Free Nova by Samuel Delany Page A

went to one of the viewing columns. It was a transparent column four feet thick supporting the clear roofing with a capital of floral glass. "Dana, do you want to show Lorq what you brought for him?"
    "Just a moment." His mother's figure formed in the column. She was sitting in the swan chair. She took a green cloth from the table beside her and opened it on the quilted brocade of her lap.
    "They're beautiful!" Lorq claimed. "Where did you find heptodyne quartz?"
    The stones, basically silicon, had been formed at geological pressures so that in each crystal, about the size of a child's fist, light flowed along the shattered blue lines within the jagged forms.
    "I picked them up when we stopped at Cygnus. We were staying near the Exploding Desert of Krall. We could see it flashing from our hotel window beyond the walls of the city. It was quite as spectacular as it's always described. One afternoon when your father was off in conference, I took the tour. When I saw them, I thought of your collection and bought these for you."
    "Thanks." He smiled at the figure in the column.
    Neither he nor his father had seen his mother in person for four years. Victim of a degenerative mental and physical disease that often left her totally incommunicative, she had retired to her suite in the house with her medicines, her diagnostic computers, her cosmetics, her gravothermy and reading machines. She— or more often one of her androids programmed to her general response pattern— would appear in the viewing columns and present a semblance of her normal appearance and personality. In the same way, through android and telerama report, she "accompanied" Von Ray on his business travels, while her physical presence was confined in the masked, isolate chambers that no one was allowed to enter except the psychotechnician who came quietly once a month.
    "They're beautiful," he repeated, stepping closer.
    "I'll leave them in your room this evening." She picked one up with dark fingers and turned it over. "I find them fascinating myself. Almost hypnotic."
    "Here." Von Ray turned to one of the other columns. "I have something else to show you. Aaron had apparently heard of your interest in racing, and knew how well you were doing." Something was forming in the second column. "Two of his engineers had just developed a new ion-coupler. They told us it was too sensitive for commercial use and wouldn't be profitable for them to manufacture on any large scale. But Aaron said the response level would be excellent for small-scale racing craft. I offered to buy it for you. He wouldn't hear of it; he's sent it to you as a gift."
    "He did?" Lorq felt excitement lap above surprise. "Where is it?"
    In the column a crate stood on the corner of a loading platform. The fence of Nea Limani Yacht Basin diminished in the distance between the guide towers. "Over at the field?" Lorq sat down in the green hammock hanging from the ceiling. "Good! I'll look at it when I go down this evening. I still have to get a crew for the race."
    "You just pick your crew from people hanging around the spacefield?" Mother shook her head. "That always worries me."
    "Mom, people who like racing, kids who are interested in racing ships, people who know how to sail, they hang around the shipyards. I know half the people at Nea Limani anyway."
    "I still wish you'd get your crew from among your school friends, or people like that."
    "What wrong is with people who like this talk?" He smiled slightly.
    "I didn't say anything of that nature at all. I just meant you should use people you know."
    "After the race," his father cut in, "what do you intend to do with the rest of your vacation?"
    Lorq shrugged. "Do you want me to foreman out at the Sao Orini mine like last year?"
    His father's eyebrows separated then snarled over the vertical crevices above his nose. "After what happened with that miner's daughter ...?" The brows unsnarled again. "Do you want to go out there again?"
    Lorq shrugged once