Free They Fly at Ciron by Samuel R. Delany Page B

your chain of trust?”
    Again Rahm noticed the chain aroundher own neck.
    “I must have lost it when we were set upon by the terrible wailing.”
    “You cannot very well go without it. As I wear the sign and trust of a Queen, so must our Handsman wear the sign and trust of one ready at any moment to become King.”
    While this was going on, Rahm looked and blinked and looked again at these furred people, who stood so close to one another—in threes, fives, or sevens, always touching—but who, now and then, would explode into the air, soaring fifty, seventy-five, a hundred-fifty yards away from any fellows.
    Already, in the margins of his take-off with Vortcir and his aunt, at the rim of their ride together, and at the edge of their landing with the others, Rahm had learned that these were a people among whom the women’s furry breasts were scarcely larger than the men’s, and that the men’s genitals were almost as internal as the women’s. The distinction between the sexes was only minimally evident, till one paused to urinate, as that male over there was doing, or when one of them was (as he realized at a glance to his left, where several were joking about a young female who evidently was) in a state of sexual excitement.
    Carefully, while trying not to be caught staring, Rahm watched them. And, in their close, nervous groups, with their small eyes they watched him back. They watched him from ledges above. They watched him from the rope nets strung from staid oak branch to staunch hemlock trunk—apparently the youngsters’ favorite place to play. They watched him from other, broader nets, strung from the rocks down by the water to the higher ledges, thirty and forty yards overhead—where, it seemed, the elderly gathered togossip, stretching their wings till they quivered. The watching was particularly strange because, by now Rahm knew, they were doing more listening than looking. What, he wondered, could they hear of him, through their constant, mewing intercourse.
    Within his first thirty minutes at Hi-Vator, Rahm saw a group of six winged children tease a smaller and younger child unmercifully. The older ones were—as far as he could tell—all boys. The little one was—most probably—a girl. The teasing reached such intensity that, twice, it became violent: had he been in his own home, Rahm would have stepped in to stop it. But now he could only look about uncomfortably for Vortcir or his aunt, both of whom happened, for the moment, to be somewhere else. Why, he wondered wildly, weren’t any other adults paying attention… ?
    Within his first three hours there, Rahm observed a game where you sailed cunningly constructed toys made of twigs and thin leather from ledge to ledge, then took them into the sky to sail them from flyer to flyer. Also he saw two other children playing with a lemur-like pet. Then he became involved in what he only realized was another game after fifteen minutes of it, as first one then another Winged One politely volunteered to fly him now to this ledge, now to another, now to still one more: and he would grasp the warm, heavy shoulders and be carried here and there around the many ledges of the gorge in which their cave dwellings were sunk, each side of a silvery feather of falling water. Rahm had already noted, upon landing, that it was a lot easier to tell the sex of the Winged One—strong young female or male—who’d just carried him. From the giggling together of those waiting to ferry him about, or others who had just finished, Rahm realized—with sudden humor—that, somehow, withthem, this flying and carrying was a sexual game: and some others, he saw now, didn’t approve!
    For ten minutes later three older ones marched up and put a rather gruff end to it. The ones who’d been playing with him fluttered off. The older ones apologized to him in a way that, though he smiled and nodded and shrugged a lot, he didn’t quite see the point of—since there was no harm in