The Fall of the Towers - Softcover

Delany, Samuel R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 140003132X ISBN 13: 9781400031320

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Come and enter Samuel Delany’s tomorow, in this trilogy of high adventure, with acrobats and urchins, criminals and courtiers, fishermen and factory-workers, madmen and mind-readers, dwarves and ducheses, giants and geniuses, merchants and mathematicians, soldiers and scholars, pirates and poets, and a gallery of aliens who fly, crawl, burrow, or swim.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

After his seventh novel Empire Star (1966), Samuel Delany began publishing short fiction professionally with “The Star Pit.” It appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow and was turned into a popular two-hour radio play, broadcast annually over WBAI-FM for more than a decade. Two tales, “Aye, and Gomorrah” and “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones,” won Nebula Awards as best SF short stories of, respectively, 1967 and 1969. Aye, and Gomorrah contains all the significant short science fiction and fantasy Delany published between 1965 and 1988, excepting only those tales in his Return to Nevèrÿon series. A native New Yorker, Delany teaches English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. In July of 2002 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

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chapter one

And above the empty stage in the laboratory tower of the dead city of Telphar, the crystal sphere dimmed. The room was silent as it had been for sixty years. From the crystal the metal ribbon soared over the balcony, above wet ashes and puddled roadways. The sun had cleared the ragged horizon. Like the back of a sleeping serpent the dripping metal gleamed.



Miles on, darkness paled before morning. In the lava fields among the ferns sat row behind row of barracks, cheerless as roosting macaws. The light rain had stopped. Water dribbled the supporting pylon. The ribbon made a black band on the fading night.

From the jungle, six people approached the barracks. They were all over seven feet tall. They carried the bodies of two ordinary-sized men. Two behind the others hung back to converse.

"What about the other one, Larta?"

"Koshar? He won't get far." She pushed back her fur cape from her shoulder; the new sun struck the brass circlets banding her upper arm.

"If he does," said the man, "he'll be the first to get through us in twelve years."

"If he makes for the coast and out to Toron," Larta said. "If we don't get him, it means he's gone inland toward the radiation barrier." They passed under the shadow of the transit ribbon. The circlets-and her eyes-darkened. "Then we won't have to worry anyway, if he goes toward Telphar, eh, Ptorn?"

The tall man's head was shaved. "I suppose I'm not really worried about the one escaping." Ptorn glanced at those passing into the sun. "But the increasing number of escape attempts over the last year . . ."

Larta shrugged. "The orders for tetron have nearly doubled." As she left the shadow, the sun lit three parallel scars down the side of her face, under her jaw, and down her neck.

Ptorn slid his right hand beneath his left arm. "I wonder what sort of leeches make their living off these miserable . . ." He didn't finish but nodded ahead.

"The hydroponics growers, the aquarium manufacturers in Toron," Larta said. "They're the ones who call for the ore. Then, there's the preparation for the war."

"They say," mused Ptorn, "that since the aquariums have taken over supplying fish to Toron, the fishermen on the coast have nowhere to sell and are being starved out. And with the increased demand for tetron, the prisoners are dying like flies here at the mines. Sometimes I wonder how they supply enough miners."

"They don't." Now Larta called ahead, "All right. We'll leave the rest to the men"-there was the gentlest contempt in the word "men" that italics would be too strong to convey-"who guard them. We've done our part. Drop them there, in front of the cabin." The rain had made the yard mud. "Maybe that'll teach the others some sort of lesson."

Two dull splashes.

"Maybe," Ptorn said.

But Larta had turned back toward the jungle, shadow from the trees brushing over her face, over the triple scar.



Streaks of sun speared the yellow clouds and pried apart the billowing rifts. Shafts of yellow sank into the lusher forests of Toromon nearer the shore. The light dropped from wet green fronds, or caught in the moist cracks of the boulders. Then dawn snagged on the metal ribbon that lanced above the trees. Webs of shadow from the supporting pylons fell over a lava bed.

A formation of airships flashed through a tear in the clouds like a handful of hurled silver chips. The buzz from their tetron motors descended through the trees. And Lug, who was four feet three inches tall, with a forehead as high as his thumb was wide, looked up from under his bony brow.

The others around him, of the same height and rounded shoulders, grunted to one another. The word repeated most often was "war." Lug motioned the others. They started again, padding over the jungle floor, the palms of their feet shaping to stone and stick and root. Their semi-opposable big toes stroked absently at the textures of the ground as one might thumb the differences, running one's hands over things in the grass.

Finally Lug leaned against a tree trunk. "Quorl?" he said. "Quorl!" he barked.

Behind branches that had been cut down and replanted to form a shapeless shelter, something turned under leaves. The lean-to had no real form from the outside, but was limited like the outside of a bush. You could only be sure it was a shelter when something moved within. A hand grasped one branch, and someone sat up inside.

They watched, whispered, then watched again. Quorl stood, emerging and emerging from the top. His yellow eyes were awake, even though the muscles in his face were settling themselves into place after what must have been a huge yawn. His nostrils rounded under the scents of the morning. Then he smiled-and stepped free of the leaves and branches.

From their stunted heights, they blinked at his seven-foot hugeness. Some only stared at the confusing wonder of his hand hanging by the thumb from his belt; others did not look above the gnarled machinery of his knee. To the neanderthals both were as expressive of marvels as his face.

"Quorl?" Lug asked.

"What is it, Lug?"

"Around the bottom of the mountain by the lake, they've come. Not the ones as big as you, but taller than us. They are like the ones at the mines, the prisoners. But these aren't prisoners, Quorl. They're building."

Quorl nodded. "Good. It seemed time they came. Time they built."

"You have seen them?"

"No."

"Someone else came and told you earlier?"

"No." Quorl's smile was subtly humorous, more subtly regretful. "It was time for them to come. It's simple." For Lug it was just a smile.

They whispered among themselves, awed by the things that the tall ones knew; and smiled back.

"Come," Quorl said. "Take me to see."

Lug looked at the others.

"Yes," Quorl said, stepping away from his shelter. "Come; we will go."

"Why?" asked Lug. "Do you want to talk to them?"

Quorl stretched up, pulled down two kharba fruits, and handed one to a boy, the other to a girl. He pulled down two more, and the leaves shook again. "No," he said. "Let's just go to see." He handed out the other two melons. "Share these."

Lug shrugged, and they all started through the trees. They broke the fruits among them. Two apish boys began to shoot seeds at one another, fell into a scuffle, fell into laughter. Quorl looked back, but they were already catching up.

"Why do we go?" Lug asked again. Such scuffles and laughter were so close to him he did not look, did not see. "You know already that the men"-and there was a slight awe in the word "men" that boldface letters would not quite suggest-"are there, what they are doing. What do you want to see? Will we help them build? Does what they build have anything to do with the war?"

Quorl pushed his hand into Lug's hair and arched his fingers, arched them again. "It rained this morning," he said. Lug bent his neck as Quorl scratched his head. "You know how the lake looks in the morning mist after rain?"

Lug straightened his shoulders, his muscles tensing with pleasure. "Yes." His lips grinned back from yellow teeth. "Yes, I know."

"That's why we go to see," Quorl said. His hand dropped to Lug's shoulder.

Behind them the ribbon crossed the top of the hundred-foot pylon, just...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 140003132X
• ISBN 13: 9781400031320
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: EDITIONS GALLIMARD; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien