The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany Page B

adventurer) and I’d gone to see one in a well explored arm two years back. Which is how I learned about the music.
    Color television is certainly a lot more fun than this terribly risky genetic method of reproduction we’ve taken over. Ah well. It’s a lovely world.
    I sat on the desk and tried knobs till one clicked. The screen grayed at me, flickered, streamed with colors.
    There was static, so I found the volume knob and turned it down ... so I could hear the music in colors. Just as I raised my blade to my mouth, something happened.
    Laughter.
    First I thought it was melody. But it was a voice laughing. And on the screen, in chaotic shimmerings , a face. It wasn’t a picture of a face. It was as if I was just looking at the particular dots of melody-hue that formed the face, ignoring the rest. I would have seen those features on any visual riot: Friza’s face.
    The voice was someone else’s.
    Friza dissolved. Another face replaced hers: Dorik’s. The strange laughter again. Suddenly there was Friza on one side of the screen, and Dorik on the other. Centered: the boy who was laughing at me. The picture cleared, filled, and I lost the rest of the room. Behind him, crumbled streets, beams jutting from the wrecks of walls, weeds writhing; and all lit with flickering green, the sun white on the reticulated sky. On a lamp-post behind him perched a creature with fins and white gills, scraping one red foot on the rust. On the curb was a hydrant laced with light and verdigris.
    The boy, a redhead-redder than the Blois , redder than blood gutted blossoms-laughed with downcast eyes. His lashes were gold. Transparent skin caught up the green and fluoresced with it; but I knew that under normal light he would have been as pale as Whitey dying.
    “Lobey,” in the laughter, and his lips uncurtained small teeth-many too many of them. Like the shark’s mouth, maybe, I’d seen in La Dire’s book, rank on rank of ivory needles. “Lobey, how you gonna find me, huh?”
    “ What. . .?” and expected the illusion to end with my voice.
    But somewhere that naked, laughing boy still stood with one foot in the gutter filled with waving weeds. Only Friza and Dorik were gone.
    “Where are you?”
    He looked up and his eyes had no whites, only glittering gold and brown. I’d seen a few like that before, eyes. Unnerving, still, to look at a dog’s eyes in a human face. “My mother called me Bonny William. Now they all call me Kid Death.” He sat on the curb, hanging his hands over his knees. “You’re gonna find me, Lobey, kill me like I killed Friza and Dorik?”
    “You? You, Lo Bonny William-“
    “Not Lo. Kid Death. Not Lo Kid.”
    “You killed them? But... why?” Despair unvoiced my words to whispers.
    “Because they were different. And I am more different than any of you. You scare me, and when I’m frightened” -laughing again-“I kill.” He blinked. “You’re not looking for me, you know. I’m looking for you.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He shook shocked crimson from his white brow. “I’m bringing you down here to me. If I didn’t want you, you’d never find me. Because I do want you, there’s no way you can avoid me. I can see through the eyes of anyone on this world, on any world where our ancestors have ever been: so I know a lot about many things I’ve never touched or smelled. You’ve started out not knowing where I am and running towards me. You’ll end, Lo Lobey”-he raised his head-“fleeing my green home, scrabbling on the sand like a blind goat trying to keep footing at a chimney edge-“
    “- how do you know about-“
    “-you’ll fall and break your neck.” He shook a finger at me, clawed like Little Jon’s. “Come to me, Lo Lobey.”
    “If I find you, will you give me back Friza?”
    “I’ve already given you back Le Dorik for a little while.”
    “Can you give me back Friza?”
    “Everything I kill I keep. In my own private kage.” His moist laughter. Water in a cold pipe, I