Free The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany

Green-eye could have talked instead of Stinky.
    I wanted to learn where he’d been, what he’d seen-he knew some good songs.
    Dragons get lost at night. So you round them up in the morning. I’d been rounded up along with the stray animals. At breakfast I gathered from Stinky that I was a replacement for somebody who had come to a bad, sad, and messy end the previous afternoon.
    “Oddest people survive out here,” Spider mused. “Oddest ones don’t. She looked a lot more ‘normal’ than you. But she ain’t here now. Just goes to show you.”
    Green-eye blinked at me from under all his black hair, caught me watching him, and went back to splicing his whip.
    “When are those dragon eggs gonna finish baking?” Knife asked, pawing at the fireplace stones with gray hands.
    Spider kicked at him and the herder scuttled away. “Wait till we all eat.” But in a few minutes he crawled back and was rubbing against the stones. “Warm,” he muttered apologetically, when Spider started to kick him again, “I like it warm.”
    “Just keep off the food.”
    “Where do you take these to?” I indicated the herd. “Where do you bring them from?”
    “They breed in the
Hot
Swamp
, about two hundred kilometers west of here. We drive them down this way, across the
Great
City
and on to Branning-at-sea. There the sterile ones are slaughtered; the eggs are removed from the females, inseminated, then we bring the eggs back and plant them in the swamp.”
    “Branning-at-sea?” I asked. “What do they do with them there?”
    “Eat most. Use others for work. It’s quite a fantastic place for someone born in the woods, I would imagine. I’ve been back and forth so many times it’s like home. I’ve got a house and a wife and three kids there, and another family back in the Swamp.”
    We ate eggs, fried lizard fat, and thick cereal, hot and filling, with plenty of salt and chopped peppers. When I finished I began to play my blade.
    That music!
    It was a whole lot of tunes at once, many the same, but starting at different times. I had to pick one strand out and play it. A few notes into it, I saw Spider staring at me, surprised. “Where did you hear that?” he asked.
    “Just made it up, I guess.”
    “Don’t be silly.”
    “It was just running around my head. All confused, though.”
    “Play it again.”
    I did. This time Spider began to whistle one of the other melodies that went along with it so that they glittered and jumped against each other.
    When we finished he said, “You’re different, aren’t you?”
    “So I’ve been told,” I said. “Say, what’s the name of that song anyway? It’s not like most of the music I know.”
    “It’s the ‘ Kodaly’s Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello.’”
    Morning wind shook the gorse. “The what?” I asked. Behind us dragons moaned.
    “You got it out of my head?” Spider said questioningly. “You couldn’t have heard it before unless I was going around humming. And I can’t hum a crescendo of triple stops.”
    “I got it from you?”
    “That music’s been going through my mind for weeks.
     
    Heard it at a concert last summer at Branning-at-sea, the night before I left to take the eggs back to the swamp. Then I discovered an LP of the piece in the music section of the ruins of the ancient library at Haifa.”
    “I learned it from you?” and suddenly all sorts of things cleared up, like how La Dire knew I was different, like how Nativia could tell I was different when I started playing Bill Bailey “Music,” I said. “So that’s where I get my music from.” I put the blade’s tip on the ground and leaned on it.
    Spider shrugged.
    “I don’t think I get all of it from other people,” I said, frowning. “Different?” I ran my thumb along the blade’s edge and skipped my toes over the holes.
    “I’m different too,” Spider said.
    “How?”
    “Like this.” He closed his eyes and all his shoulders knotted.
    My machete jerked from my hand, pulled