Nova (30 page)

"You ... you got your Illyrion, Captain?"

Again Lorq raised his hand before his face, this time in a fist. He tried to focus on it. With his other hand he grabbed for it, half missed, grabbed again, missed completely, then again; opened fingers grappled the closed ones. The doubled fist shook as with palsy.

"Seven tons! The only materials dense enough to center in the hole are the trans-three-hundred elements. Illyrion! It floats free there, for whoever wants to go in and sweep it up. Fly your ship in, then look around to see where it is, and sweep it up with your projector vanes. It collects on the nodes of your projectors. Illyrion— nearly free of impurities." His hands came apart. "Just ... go on sensory input, and look around to see where it is." He lowered his face. "She lay there, her face— her face an amazing ruin in the center of hell. And I swept my seven arms across the blinding day to catch the bits of hell that floated by— "He raised his head again. "There's an Illyrion mine down on New Brazillia.

Outside the window a mottled planet hung huge in the sky. "They have equipment here for handling Illyrion shipments. But you should have seen their faces when we brought in our seven tons, hey, Mouse?" He laughed loudly again. "That's right, Mouse? You told me what they looked like, yes?

Mouse?"

"That's right, Captain."

Lorq nodded, breathed deep. "Katin, Mouse, your job is over. You've got your walking papers. Ships leave here regularly. You shouldn't have any trouble getting on another one."

"Captain," Katin ventured, "what are you going to do?"

"On New Brazillia, there's a home where I spent much pleasant time when I was a boy. I'm going back there ... to wait"

"Isn't there something you could do, Captain? I looked and— "

"What? Speak louder."

"I said, I'm all and I looked!" Katin's voice broke.

"You looked going away. I looked searching the center, The neural distortion is all the way up into the brain. Neurocongruency." He shook his head. "Mouse, Katin, Ashton Clark to you."

"But Captain— "

"Ashton Clark."

Katin looked at the Mouse, then back at the captain. The Mouse fiddled with the strap of his sack. Then he looked up. After a moment they turned and left the lightless room.

Outside they once more gazed across the moonscape.

"So," Katin mused. "Von Ray has it and Prince and Ruby don't."

"They're dead," the Mouse told him. "Captain said he killed them."

"Oh." Katin looked out on the moonscape. After a while he said: "Seven tons of Illyrion, and the balance begins to shift. Draco is setting as the Pleiades rises. The Outer Colonies are going to go through some changes. Bless Ashton Clark that labor relocation isn't too difficult today. Still, there are going to be problems. Where're Lynceos and Idas?"

"They've already gone. They got a stellar-gram from their brother and they've gone to see him, since they were here in the Outer Colonies."

"Tobias?"

"That's right."

"Poor twins. Poor triplets. When this Illyrion gets out and the change begins ..." Katin snapped his fingers. "No more bliss." He looked up at the sky, nearly bare of stars. "We're at a moment of history, Mouse."

The Mouse scraped wax from his ear with his little fingernail. His earring glittered. "Yeah. I was thinking that myself."

"What are you going to do now?"

The Mouse shrugged. "I really don't know. So I asked Tyy to give me a Tarot reading."

Katin raised his eyebrows.

"She and Sebastian are downstairs now. Their pets got loose around the bar. Scared everybody half to death and almost broke up the place." He laughed harshly. "You should have seen it. Soon as they get finished calming down the owner, they're coming up to read my cards. I'll probably get another job studding. There's not much reason to think about the mines now." His fingers closed on the leather sack under his arm. "There's still a lot to see, a lot I have to play. Maybe you and me can stick together a while, get on the same ship. You're funny as hell sometimes. But I don't dislike you half as much as I dislike a lot of other people. What are your plans?"

"I haven't really had time to think about them." He slipped his hands beneath his belt and lowered his head.

"What are you doing?"

"Thinking."

"What?"

"That here I am on a perfectly good moon; I've just finished up a job, so I won't have any worries for a while. Why not sit down and get some serious work done on my novel?" He looked up. "But you know, Mouse? I don't really know if I want to write a book."

"Huh?"

"When I was looking at that nova ... no, after it, just before I woke and thought I'd have to spend the rest of my life in blinkers, ear and nose plugs, while I went noisily nuts, I realized how much I hadn't looked at, how much I hadn't listened to, smelled, tasted— how little I knew of those basics of life you have literally at your fingertips. And then Captain— "

"Hell," the Mouse said. With his bare foot he toed dust from his boot. "You're not going to write it after all the work you've already done?"

"Mouse, I'd like to. But I still don't have a subject. And I've just gotten prepared to go out and find one— Right now I'm just a bright guy with a lot to say and nothing to say it about."

"That's a fink-out," the Mouse grunted. "What, about the captain and the Roc? And you said you wanted to write about me. Okay, go ahead. And write about you too. Write about the twins. You really think they'd sue you? They'd be tickled pink, both of them. I want you to write it, Katin. I might not be able to read it, but I'd sure listen if you read it to me."

"You would?"

"Sure. After all you've put into it this far, if you stopped now, you wouldn't be happy at all."

"Mouse, you tempt me. I've wanted to do nothing else for years." Then Katin laughed. "No, Mouse. I'm too much the thinker still. This last voyage of the Roc? I'm too aware of all the archetypical patterns it follows. I can see myself now, turning it into some allegorical Grail quest. That's the only way I could deal with it, hiding all sorts of mystic symbolism in it. Remember all those writers who died before they finished their Grail recountings?"

"Aw, Katin, that's a lot of nonsense. You've got to write it!"

"Nonsense like the Tarot? No, Mouse. I'd fear for my life with such an undertaking." Again he looked over the landscape. The moon, so known to him, for a moment put him at peace with all the unknown beyond. "I want to. I really do. But I'd be fighting a dozen jinxes from the start, Mouse. Maybe I could. But I don't think so. The only way to protect myself from the jinx, I guess, would be to abandon it before I finish the last

Athens, June '66— New York, May '67

SAMUEL R. DELANY was born in New York City on April 1, 1942. He grew up in New York's Harlem district and attended the Bronx High School of Science. At City College he served as poetry editor of the magazine Prometheus.

He composed his first novel at nineteen and, at intervals between novels, worked in jobs ranging from shrimpboat worker to folk singer— in places as diverse as the Texas Gulf, Greece and Istanbul. 

Samuel Delany has won the coveted Nebula Award four times, twice for short stories ("Aye, and Gomorrah" and 'Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones") and twice for novels (Babel-7 and The Einstein Intersection). 

His other works include The Fall of the Towers, The Jewels of Aptor, Nova, Dhalgren and Triton. In addition, he and his wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker, founded and edited the avant-garde science fiction journal Quark from their base in London, where they presently live with their daughter.