Free The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany Page B

those,” Spider shouted when we were charging along again. “We’ll be crossing the City in a little while if we’re not too far off course. I’ve been swinging us westward.”
    My arm was sore.
    Once I got twenty seconds of calm riding time beside Green-eye: “Isn’t this a pretty stupid way to waste your life, fellow?”
    He grinned.
    Then two very friendly dragons came galumphing and moaning between us. Sweat slopped into my eyes and my armpits felt oiled. The harness made it a little easier on my inner thighs; they got raw slow ‘stead of quick. I could hardly see and was playing it more by ear than eye when Spider called, “Back on course! City up ahead!”
    I looked up but fresh sweat flooded my eyes and the heat made everything waver. I drove dragons. The gorse lessened, and we started down.
    Earth crumbled under their claws. With no vegetation to blunt the temperature, the sun stuck gold needles in the backs of our necks. Reflected heat from the ground. At last, sand.
    The dragons had to slow. Spider paused beside me to thumb sweat from his eyes. “We usually take
McClellan Avenue
,” he told me as he looked across the dunes. “But I think we’re closer to
Main Street
. This hits McClellan a few miles out. We’ll stop at the intersection and rest until nightfall.” The dragons hissed out across the city sands. Swamp creatures, they were not used to this dry-ness. As we plowed the ancient place, silent and furious with hundreds of beasts, I remember crossing a moment of untimed horror, when through void buff I imagined myself surrounded of a sudden, crowded by millions, straited by walls, sooty, fuming, roaring with the dread, dead old race of the planet.
    I flailed my whip and beat away the notion. The sun ground its light into the sand.

    Two dragons began to annoy each other and I flicked them apart. They snatched at my lash indignantly, missed. My breath filed my throat. Yet, as the two moved away, I realized I was grinning. Alone, we toiled through the day, content and terrified.
     
    Slipped from the night waters of the Adriatic and now we skirt down the strait towards Piraeus. At the horizon right and left monstrously beautiful mountains gnaw the sky. The ship is easy on the morning. The speakers give up French, English, and Greek pop music. Sun silvers the hosed deck, burns over the smokestack. Bought deck passage; big and bold last night I walked into a cabin and slept beautifully. Back outside this morning I wonder what effect Greece will have on TE1. The central subject of the book is myth. This music is so appropriate for the world I float on. I was aware how well it fitted the capsulated life of
New York
. Its torn harmonies are even more congruent with the rest of the world. How can I take Lobey into the center of this bright chaos propelling these sounds? Drank late with the Greek sailors last night; in bad Italian and worse Greek we talked about myths. Taiki learned the story of Orpheus not from school or reading but from his aunt in Eleusis . Where, shall I go to learn it? The sailors my age wanted to hear pop English and French music on the portable radio. The older ones wanted to hear the traditional Greek songs. “Demotic songs!” exclaimed Demo, “All the young men in the words want to die as soon as possible because love has treated them badly!”
    “Not so with Orpheus,” Taiki said, a little mysteriously, a little high.
    Did Orpheus want to live after he lost Eurydice the second time? He had a very modern choice to make when he decided to look back. What is its musical essence?
    Author’s Journal: Gulf of Corinth, November 1965
    I drive fine dragons for a fine dragon lord, a lord of fine dragons and his dragon horde.
    Green-eye sang that silently as we dropped from our mounts. For the first time in my life I caught words as well as melody. It surprised me and I turned to stare. But he was loosening the harness on his beast.
    The sky was blue glass. West, clouds smudged the