Free Neveryona by Samuel R. Delany Page A

signaled to the tattooed man, who is coming over. We’d best pass on. From fear of contagion, if not true sympathy for the heightened consciousness these tools presuppose and require, he is perhaps the most insistent among these vendors that whoever handles his wares should purchase.
    ‘But you have noticed those barrels there. Have such casks come as far north as Ellamon? They contain the southern beer that so puzzled you a moment back, though in Kolhari it has become the passion of nearly every free laborer. The thirsts it satisfies, you might well mark, not only mirror but mock those spiritual thirsts we’ve been talking of. Certainly the children lugging up their double-handled beer pots, ready to carry them here and there for a working aunt, or father, or uncle, or the houseboys and market maids there with their waxed leather bags, the insides still moist with yesterday’s draught, attest to the materiality of such thirsts, however much our poets try to spiritualize them. Note that young woman, with her pitcher, hesitating behind the crowd lined up at the syphon.
    ‘I shall talk more of
her
in a moment.
    ‘But have you marked the smaller barrels further down, attended by that wizened little woman with country labor stamped all over the flesh of her hands and in the muscles that band her wrinkled cheeks? Notice how she holds her bristly chin high, which means her neck once wore an iron collar – wore it many years. The casks she oversees contain a delicate cider from the family estate, high in the northern hills, of the late Baron Inige. Its taste pleased his family and his family’s guests for generations; and in his own lifetime, thanks to his interest in horticulture,that taste reached a piquancy unsurpassed in the nation – at least that’s the claim of those who can afford to pursue such investigations. One or two of our more prosperous waterfront taverns managed to import it only a handful of years ago, making the journey up to the hills and bringing it back in their own carts. In the last year, the estate itself, fallen on hard times since the baron’s death, has let that freed retainer there bring in a few barrels from time to time to sell in the market here.
    ‘But I was speaking of the young woman who hesitates with her pitcher between the two. For, though I have never been inside her home, simply from passing her in the market, seeing her on the street with her mother, watching her run across Black Avenue to greet her father, I have learned a great deal about her – and her situation. Her father is a workman, who loves his beer with the best, but who, some years back, had the notion and the money to hire several of his fellows, specializing in the laying of underground clay pipes; his skill and the skill of the artisans he employs has improved his condition in every way. The girl’s mother was once a washer woman who laundered fine fabrics for the families of Sallese; but when she and her husband built their new home in the prospering tradespeople’s district on the west side of the city, a sense of decorum made her sacrifice her laundering to the very real duties of her newer, larger home. The girl’s brother, as a boy, was apprenticed to a successful pot spinner down in Potter’s Lane to replace an erring youth who disappeared from the same position into the barbaric south with money and franchise orders some years back. The girl is terribly proud of her younger brother, for you know that the very gods of our country are represented as patient, meticulous craftsfolk, who labor at the construction of the world and who may never be named till it is completed.
    ‘The girl plays beautifully on several of the stringed instruments they carve so well in the east. When she was a baby, a wise woman, begging from door to door in the city, saw the child, cast bones and wooden coins on the pavement, and read, in the array, of a great and profitable musical talent asleep in the infant’s fingers. The