Dhalgren (127 page)

Girders wheeled on either side. About twenty feet beyond the first stanchion, I looked back again:

The burning city squatted on weak, inverted images of its fires.

Finally D-t touched my shoulder and made a little gesture with his head. So I came on.

The double, thigh-thick suspensors swung even lower than our walkway; a few yards later they sloped up toward the top of the next stanchion.

"Who is…?" Glass asked softly.

Down on the black-top, She was walking slowly toward us.

Running my hand along the rail, I watched. Then I called: "Hey, you!"

Behind me there was a flare; then another; then another. The others had flicked on their lights—which meant I was in silhouette before a clutch of dragons, hawks, and mantises.

She squinted up at us: a dark Oriental, with hair down in front of her shirt (like two black, inverted flames); red bandanas were stuffed under the shoulder straps of her knapsack for padding. Her shirttails were out of her jeans. "Huh…?" She was trying to smile.

"You going into Bellona?"

"That's right." She squinted harder to see me. "You leaving?"

"Yeah," I said. "You know, it's
dangerous
in there!"

She nodded. "I'd heard they had the national guard and soldiers and stuff posted. Hitch-hiking down, though, I didn't see anybody."

"How were the rides?"

"All I saw was a pickup and a Willy's station wagon. The pickup gave me a lift."

"What about traffic going out?"

She shrugged. "I guess if somebody passes you, they'll give you a ride. Sometimes the truckers will stop for a guy to spell them on driving. I mean, guys shouldn't have too tough a time. Where're you heading?"

Over my shoulder, Glass said: "I want to get to Toronto. Two of us are heading for Alabama, though."

"I just wanted to get someplace!" Fireball said. "I don't feel right, you know? I ain't
really
felt right for two days…!"

"You got a long way to go, either direction," she said.

I wondered what she made of the luminous light-shapes that flanked me and threw pastel shadows behind her on the gridded black-top.

Glass asked: "Everything is still all right in Canada—?"

"—and Alabama?" asked Spider.

"Sure. Everything's all right in the rest of the country. Is anything still happening here?"

When nobody answered, she said:

"It's just the closer you get, the funnier… everybody acts. What's it like inside?"

D-t said: "Pretty rough."

The others laughed.

She laughed.

"But like you say," Dragon Lady said, "guys have a pretty easy time," which I don't think she got, because unless you listen hard, Dragon Lady's voice sounds like a man's.

"Is there anything you can tell me? I mean that might be helpful? Since I'm going in?"

"Yeah," I said. "Sometimes men'll come around and tear up the place you live in. Sometimes people shoot at you from the roof—that is, if the roof itself doesn't decide to fall on you. Or you're not the person on top of it, doing the shooting—"

"He wrote these poems," Fireball said at my other shoulder. "He wrote these poems and they published them in a book and everything! They got it all over the city. But then he wrote some more, only they came and burned them all up—" His voice shook on the fevered lip of hysteria.

"You want a weapon," I asked, "to take in with you?"

"Wow!" she said. "Is it like that?"

Glass gave a short, sharp laugh.

"Yeah," I said. "We have it easy."

Spider said: "You gonna tell her about… the Father? You gonna tell her about June?"

"She'll learn about those."

Glass laughed again.

D-t said: "What can you say?"

She ran her thumbs down her knapsack straps and settled her weight on one hip. She wore heavy, hiking shoes, one a lot muddier than the other. "Do I need a weapon?"

"You gonna give her that?" Dragon Lady asked as I took my orchid off its chain.

"We got ourselves in enough trouble with this," I said. "I don't want it with me any more."

"Okay," Dragon Lady said. "It's yours."

"Where you from?" Glass was asking.

"Down from Canada."

"You don't look Canadian."

"I'm not. I was just visiting."

"You know Albright?"

"No. You know Pern?"

"No. You know any of the little towns around Southern Ontario?"

"No. I spent all my time around Vancouver and B.C."

"Oh," Glass said.

"Here's your weapon." I tossed the orchid. It clattered on the blacktop, rolled jerkily, and stopped.

"What is—?" The sound of a car motor made us all look toward the end of the bridge; but it died away on some turnoff. She looked back. "What
is
it?" "How they call that?" Fireball asked.

"An orchid," I said.

"Yeah," Fireball said. "That's what it is."

She stooped, centered in her multiple shadows. She kept one thumb under her pack-strap; with her other band she picked it up.

"Put it on," I said.

"Are you right or left handed?" Glass asked.

"Left." She stood, examining the flower. "At least, I write with my left."

"Oh," Glass said again.

"This is a pretty vicious looking thing." She fitted it around her wrist; something glittered there. "Just the thing for the New York subway during rush hour." She bent her neck to see how it snapped. As her hair swung forward, under her collar was another, bright flash. "Ugly thing. I hope I don't need you."

I said: "Hope you don't either."

She looked up.

Spider and D-t had turned off their lights and were looking, anxiously, beyond the second stanchion toward the dark hills of the safer shore.

"I guess," I told her, "you can give it to somebody else when you're ready to be among the dried and crisp branches, trying to remember it, get it down, thinking: I didn't leave them like that! I didn't. It's not real. It can't be. If it is then I am crazy. I am too tired—wandering among all these, and these streets where the burning, burning, leaves the shattered and the toppling. Brick, no bridge because it takes so long, leaving, I haven't leaving. That I was following down the dark blood blots her glittering heel left on the blacktop. They slid into the V of my two shadows on the moon and George lit along the I walk on and kept. Leaving it. Twigs, leaves, bark bits along the shoulder, the hissing hills and the smoke, the long country cut with summer and no where to begin. In the direction, then, Broadway and train tracks, limping in the in the all the dark blots till the rocks, running with rusty water, following beside the broken mud gleaming on
the
ditch edge, with the trees so over so I went into them and thought I could wait here until she came, all naked up or might knowing what I couldn't, remember maybe if just one of them. He. In or on, I'm not quite where I go or what to go now but I'll climb up on the and wonder about Mexico if she, come, waiting.

This hand full of crumpled leaves.

It would be better than here. Just in the like that, if you can't remember any more if. I want to know but I can't see are you up there. I don't have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to

San Francisco, Abaqii, Toronto, Clarion, Milford, New Orleans, Seattle, Vancouver, Middletown, East Lansing, New York, London
January 1969/September 1973

S
amuel 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-17
and
The Einstein Intersection).
His Other works include
The Fall of the Towers, The Jewels of Aptor, Nova
and
DHALGREN
. In addition, he and his ex-wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker, founded and edited the avant-garde science fiction journal
Quark
from their base in London. Delany is a professor of creative writing and English at Temple University in Philadelphia.