“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 anymore.”
“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 hand 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 anymore 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
A Biography of Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. Delany was born April 1, 1942, in New York City. His many works range from autobiography and essays to literary and cultural criticism—some dozen volumes’ worth—to fiction and science fiction, this last his most widely recognized genre. After eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, for fourteen years Delany has been a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.
With a younger sister, Delany grew up in Harlem—at the time, the city’s black ghetto. His father, Samuel Sr., owned and operated the Levy & Delany Funeral Home. Delany’s mother, Margaret Delany, was a clerk in the New York Public Library system. The family lived in the two floors over Samuel Sr.’s Seventh Avenue business.
Delany’s grandfather, Henry Beard Delany, was born a slave in Georgia in 1857, and became the first black suffrage Episcopal bishop of the Archdiocese of North and South Carolina as well as vice-chancellor of a black Episcopal college, St. Augustine’s, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Through kindergarten, Delany attended the Horace Mann–Lincoln School and, at age five, began at the Dalton School in New York. When he was eleven, on his first day at a new summer camp, young Samuel renamed himself Chip. It stuck—and his friends still call him that.
For the ninth grade, he went on to the Bronx High School of Science. On his first day, Delany met and became friends with the young poet Marilyn Hacker. A year younger than Delany but a year ahead of him in school, Hacker was accepted at New York University at age fifteen. Three years later, Delany, now nineteen, and Hacker, eighteen, were married in Detroit and, on returning to New York, took up residence in a tenement on a dead-end street in the recently renamed East Village.
Delany finished and sold his first published novel, The Jewels of Aptor, when he was still nineteen. It appeared in November 1962, seven months after his twentieth birthday. Before his twenty-second, he’d completed and sold four more novels, including a trilogy that was originally released one at a time, but today is usually published in one large volume: The Fall of the Towers.
Though the reviews were all good, there were not many. No one paid much attention to the new young writer until the shortest of those four books, The Ballad of Beta-2, was nominated for the first Nebula Award in the novella category—given by the then-new organization the Science Fiction Writers of America. The book did not win, and Delany was unaware the book had been nominated till years later. However, that he made any showing at all, considering his age and his unknown status, is remarkable.
On April 15, 1966, Delany returned to New York from six months in Europe, a trip that was to influence all his work over the coming years. In the meantime, another short novel, Empire Star, had appeared, followed by Babel-17.
In March of ’67, this last title won the year’s Nebula, in a tie with Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon. A year later, Delany won two more Nebulas, the first for his novel The Einstein Intersection, and the second for his short story “Aye, and Gomorrah.” This period climaxed two years later with the publication of his novel Nova, finished a month after his twenty-fifth birthday, and the publication of his short story collection Driftglass. Today Nova remains among Delany’s most popular books. Now, however, came five years with no novels.
Delany had identified as gay since his tenth year, and his marriage with Hacker was an open one for both of them. In this time they lived together and apart, now in San Francisco for two years, now in New York, now in London, where, in 1974, their daughter was born.