Neveryona

NEVERYÓNA

Samuel R. Delany

www.sfgateway.com

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

… 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.

J
ULIA
K
RISTEVA
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
un
twisted 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 fireplace 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’ by yourself. 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 milkless, 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 rock-weed 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!