Read Online Tales of Neveryon by Samuel R. Delany - Free Book Online

entire edifice?
    No one knew his way around the
entire
court. Indeed, though his mistress went occasionally, Jahor had never been anywhere near the Empress’s suite or the throne room. He knew the location of the wing only by report.
    What about the Child Empress herself? Did she know all of it?
    Oh, especially not the Child Empress herself, Jahor explained, an irony that our potter’s boy might have questioned, but which was just another strangeness to the ex-pit slave.
    But it was after this conversation that Jahor’s company too began to fall off.
    Gorgik’s aristocratic friends had a particularly upsetting habit: one day they would be perfectly friendly, if not downright intimate; the next afternoon, if they were walking with some companion unknown to Gorgik, they would pass him in some rocky corridor and not even deign recognition – even if he smiled, raised his hand, or started to speak. Such snubs and slights would have provoked our potter, however stoically he forebore, to who-knows-what final outburst, ultimate indelicacy, or denouncement of the whole, undemocratic sham. But though Gorgik saw quite well he was the butt of such behavior more than they, he saw too that they treated him thus not because he was different so much as because thatwas the way they treated each other. The social hierarchy and patterns of deference to be learned here were as complex as those that had to be mastered – even by a foreman – on moving into a new slave barracks in the mine. (Poor potter! With all his simplistic assumptions about the lives of aristocrats, he would have had just as many about the lives of slaves.) Indeed, among slaves Gorgik knew what generated such complexity: servitude itself. The only question he could not answer here was: what were all
these
elegant lords and ladies slaves to? In this, of course, the potter would have had the advantage of knowledge. The answer was simple: power, pure, raw and obsessive. But in his ignorance, young Gorgik was again closer to the lords and ladies around him than an equally young potter’s boy would have been. For it is precisely at its center that one loses the clear vision of what surrounds, what controls and contours every utterance, decides and develops every action, as the bird has no clear concept of air, though it support her every turn, or the fish no true vision of water, though it blur all she sees. A goodly, if not frightening, number of these same lords and ladies dwelling at the Court had as little idea of what shaped their every willed decision, conventional observance, and sheer, unthinking habit as did Gorgik – whereas the potter’s boy Gorgik might have been, had the play of power five years before gone differently in these same halls and hives, would not even have had to ask.
    For all the temperamental similarities we have drawn, Gorgik was not (nor should we be) under any illusion that either the lords, or their servants, accepted him as one of their own. But he had conversation; he had companionship – for some periods extremely warm companionship – from women and men who valued him for much the same reason as the Vizerine had. He was given frequent gifts.From time to time people in rooms he was not in and never visited suggested to one another that they look out for the gruff youngster in the little room on the third floor, see that he was fed, or that he was not left too much alone. (And certainly a few times when such conversations might have helped, they never occurred.) But Gorgik, stripped to nothing but his history, began to learn that even such a history – on the docks and in the mines – as it set him apart in experience from these others, was in some small way the equivalent of an aristocracy in itself: those who met him here at Court either did not bother him about it, or they respected it and made allowances for his eccentricities because of it – which is, after all, all their own aristocratic privileges gained them from one