Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Delany, Samuel R.

  ‘But it wasn’t,’ said Alsrod, who no doubt had already received one version or another of the tale from her siblings and parents, if not from her home world’s GI.

  ‘True. Eventually Klaven managed to get itself together again – but not before a number of its inhabitants had also managed to get themselves a new home, Gylda among them. She’d probably been some kind of free-agented professional1 before she came here, though we don’t have much information about that period of her life. On Velm, she lived a while in the north, didn’t like it, moved to the south, and did. At one point, however, she was up on our smaller moon, Arvin – ’

  ‘Ah,’ Alsrod sighed, ‘moons – yes, wonderful, tiny, attenuated moons, where night and gravity are stretched nearly to the breaking.’

  It had so much the sound of a quote from some poet I’d ought to have read, I didn’t bother to ask GI to identify the allusion.

  ‘Moons,’ Alsrod repeated. ‘We don’t have any moons around Zetzor. It’s a great sadness to me.’

  ‘Well, we have two.’ I said. ‘Moons are smaller than worlds. People stay closer together on moons. Vondramach Okk and her entourage were en route from one star to another, when she stopped at Arwin’s relay station. In spite of her security, she and Gylda met. The middle-aged tyrant was much impressed with the young woman colonist and hired her right there. Gylda worked for Vondramach over the next half-dozen years, travelling with her and without her about the galaxy, with a freedom that, from all reports, was rather like yours with your government’s gift of unlimited space-fare. At the end of her services – ’

  ‘– Vondramach gave her Dyethshome!’ Alsrod supplied, looking about the high-ceilinged court. ‘As a reward for her faithfulness!’

  ‘I’ve always suspected it was a bit more complicated than that.’ I looked about my home. ‘Vondramach was one of the great proponents of the Family. Gylda was an adherent of the Sygn – as was most of Velm at the time. It probably wouldn’t have made that much difference to them, as both of them were personally very tolerant, but one of Gylda’s major reasons for retiring was that she wanted to raise children for a while. Sometime before she left Klaven, she’d suffered several massive radiation contacts. She had so many smashed and shattered chromosomes only a complex enzyme therapy kept her from blooming into rampant malignancies three or four times a week. She’d been sterilized when very young – probably under unpleasant conditions. Because of that old radiation bout, she couldn’t be cloned. But Gylda had a kind of single-mindedness – not unlike Vondramach’s, I flatter myself in thinking. She had all of Dyethshome to let kids run around in; and believe me, that’s some running. When she came back to Morgre and moved in here, she adopted two human females, Lane and Neza, and a human male, Vrach, from the north of our world. They’d been orphaned in the early conflicts between the native evelm and human colonists. She brought them up, here at Dyethshome, while she collected the art works and cultural artifacts that gave this place its purpose in the culture of Morgre. Over the next fifteen years, Gylda and her three children survived all seven visits Vondramach paid her – I mention it because not everyone did. When Vondramach came to visit, she brought not only her entourage but her whole lifestyle, which included assassination attempts, strategic murders, political intrigues and factional hugger-mugger of precisely the sort Gylda had left her services to get away from. On Vondramach’s sixth visit the killing of Secretary Argenia occurred right there in Dyethshome’s north court at a formal supper party of a hundred guests. Today we hardly ever use it – I’m sure the custom goes back to the Argenia assassination. Visiting students are the only ones who ever go in there now. There was never any doubt in Gylda’s mind that Vondramach herself was responsible for the murder. On her seventh visit, Gylda suggested that Vondramach not come back. This time there was quite an argument. But the tyrant refrained from bombing Dyethshome, blowing up Morgre, and blighting the land for a hundred kilometres in all directions – all things she was quite capable of doing when she got riled. But she never returned. Five years later she was overthrown. Three years after that, she was dead. And Gylda went on with her life here. The only one of Gylda’s children interested in raising more children was the male, Vrach. Vrach Dyeth and her lover, another human male, Orgik Korm, took over Dyethshome. They had two male children cloned from the germ-plasm of a friend of theirs on store in a local plasm-bank, a former lover of both of them, who had been killed some years before in a local mountain slide up in the Myaluths. These clone-twins, Cyar and Hashe, began the third wave of Dyeths to live here at Dyethshome. Vrach and Orgik later adopted a human female also from the north, named Jekk, which completed that wave’s ripple. There’s some unpleasantness connected with Hashe, the details of which I don’t really know. She went off and did something nobody approved of, but what it was I’m not sure. Jekk and Cyar decided, when they were in their late fifties, they wanted to carry on with Dyeths for another ripple. Both of them had jobs1 as evelmian ethnologists. They worked with an ethnological commune that was helping the native evelmi who were fleeing from the north – human/evelm relations have always been strained up there. Dyethshome was given over to their ethnological commune, so that the place became a laboratory as well as a museum in those years, and all the humans and evelmi who worked here became the next ripple of Dyeth parents: Gubba, Rhis, and Wee are some of the names of those adults. And their children – all adopted and all native evelmi – included Kee’fa, Jatch’jat, another Vrach, Large Maxa, Ari, and Liji … Gylda lived a dozen years into this fourth nonhuman ripple of the Dyeth stream. She was very pleased about it, too. People often wonder why evelm/human relations have been so much better in the south. Myself, I think it’s because both populations are smaller here – and we always have the north’s appalling example to instruct us. Ari was the first of that ripple to decide on more children, and she brought in as a child one of my own grandmothers, Genya, who, as an adult, joined with Large Maxa from the generation before, who’s also parenting for this generation as well – but you know, evelmi mature more slowly than humans and live longer. So actually numbering ripples beyond this point gets confusing. The point is, however, there are no direct egg-and-sperm relations between any ripple of parents and any ripple of children at Dyethshome – nor have there ever been, since Gylda began the stream, seven ripples ago.’

  ‘But when there are so many paths and parameters,’ Alsrod declared, or rather, as I recognized a few words into it, quoted, ‘along which and around which women – young, old, human, evelm, male, female, and neuter – can develop both community and communion to be passed on to others, why should you restrict yourselves to direct egg-and-sperm relations? That’s wonderful!’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘It may not be all that wonderful, but it’s the way our particular nurture stream worked out. More than half the streams here in Morgre have used direct genetic reproduction in some form or another at least once a ripple, since their founding. Perhaps in Gylda’s time there was active resentment against it as a method. It smacked too much of Family Life, which had already proved disastrous in the north. But there isn’t today. Egg-and-sperm relations between stream ripples? Myself, I like to think of it as a method we just haven’t gotten around to yet.’

  ‘And now you must tell her why you call it a stream – instead of a family with a small “f”,’ Fibermich said, stepping up beside her sister, with great approval beaming in her face.

  ‘Well, I – ’

  Fibermich immediately darted away again.

  ‘Oh, please,’ said Alsrod, while I looked after her. ‘I want you to say it!’

  I laughed again. ‘If you’re really interested. But I know you know it already. All right. Velm is a very dry world. Water is rare here. The propagation of nurture has always been highly respected among the evelm. But none of their local languages ever developed a general term for reproductive lines. “Stream” was the term they used for their educational paths, their universities, which extended all over the planet
. When the human and evelm cultures melded, here in the south, the appropriation of the educational sign to the nurturing situation was one result.’

  ‘And now,’ declared Nea, peering at me over her young sister’s shoulder, ‘you must tell her the conceptual ways in which a stream differs from a family.’

  ‘Perhaps we should leave that till …’ Even someone who likes to talk as much as I do and works2 at it eventually feels a sense of occasional strain when running on too much. ‘I mean, I’m sure Alsrod already knows it, so that – ’

  ‘But I must hear it in your own voice,’ Alsrod exclaimed. ‘It’s what I have come light-years for!’

  ‘All right,’ I said once more. ‘But there’re so many ways that a stream differs from a family, I don’t know where to start. The father-mother-son that makes up the basic family unit, at least as the Family has described it for centuries now, represents a power structure, a structure of strong powers, mediating powers, and subordinate powers, as well as paths for power developments and power restrictions. It’s also a conceptual structure as well, a model through which to see many different situations. The Family has always been quite loose in applying that system to any given group of humans or nonhumans, breeding or just living together, so that you can have lots of fathers, lots of mothers, lots of sons; and any woman of any age or any gender can always fill any of the roles; I’m sure the right Family analyst could reinterpret our nurture stream or your reproductive commune as a classical “family” without an eyeblink, just by assigning one or more parts to one or more women. But if we agreed to the model, no doubt we’d begin to stabilize the power structure it controls. But there’re other power structures that can apply to nurturing groups. For instance, in the Family structure, the parents are seen to contain and enclose the children, to protect them from society. In the stream structure, the children are the connection between the parents and the society. To become a parent is to immediately have your child change your relation to society. Suddenly you have to deal with nurseries, nutrition co-ops, study-groups – a whole raft of social institutions. Because most children don’t generate from within streams, the stream structure conceives of all children as gifts from society, as gifts to society. In the stream structure – ’

  ‘Now translate!’ Alsrod suddenly cried.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I know that Dyethshome used to be the scene of marvellous theatrical productions for all of Morgre – all of M-81. And I have come here to see one – metaphorically speaking, of course. And you are so generously providing it! No, I have not read Okk’s verse, but I’ve studied the works of one of your greatest playwrights and musicians, Jae’l Bazerat, whose finest productions were performed here in the amphitheatre at Dyethshome. She wrote of the streams that ran across the deserts and swamps of your world – the universities – both before and after humans left their pawprints here.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘Among academic playwrights she’s considered – ’

  ‘Yet Vondramach is your poet, Marq Dyeth!’ Alsrod beamed once more, as though some extremely important point had been made. ‘Now translate for me.’ She pointed to the book I still held but which, in the course of my disquisition, I’d forgotten. ‘You mean this … poem?’ The runes of the long-dead tyrant, whose childhood friends had called her Dramach and whose adult intimates had addressed her as Vondra (a word which, in her own language, meant ‘the taloned claw’), hung in the air above the stage my hand made. I wondered whether Alsrod’s abrupt change of subject was an expression of boredom, a social custom, a logic alien to me, or simply personal avidity. ‘Well … this one is from her series of participatory poems. She added to the sequence all her life. Its title translates “The Strange” … or maybe better, “The Awkward”. But the word can also mean “The Exotic”, or simply “Another Person” – or also, “Another System”.’ (Somewhere in her journals, Okk writes: Poetry is what is avoided as it is surrounded by translation. In her own language, however, it only takes three words, all beginning with the same sound, ‘ch’.) ‘Anyway, she provides one half-line and a single letter that you have to work into a word in your own version of a second half-line …’ But how could anyone who didn’t know Vondramach Okk’s private tongue appreciate the participatory works? Beneath the book I fingered the random selector: runes flickered till I released the touch-tab. ‘Now this one … yes, happens to be another of my favourites: The title means “The President”, or maybe “The Ruler”, though it doesn’t come from a word root meaning either measuring, straightening, or presiding. The particular root word – which she also invented – means “stroking softly” or, in some cases, “mangling”.’

  ‘Is it autobiographical?’ Alsrod asked.

  I was surprised. ‘Many commentators have taken it to be – though she wrote a much earlier draft of it when she was still a child at the hospital station at Jryla. But really, Alsrod, perhaps the next time you come you’ll be wired for local GI compatibility and we can …’

  Nea still stood with her hand poised above her sister’s shoulders. I saw Fibermich off and joking uproariously with a bunch of parents, for all the world as though she were barring them from our conversation. Then I turned and saw what, in the corner of my eye, had given that impression: her metallic figure chased at forearms, temples, and calves with high veins, George Thant stood up on the bench by the spillway, arms folded, legs apart, staring over the milling heads between at Nea, Santine, Alsrod, and me. George frowned intently. At any intergeosector party people always do strange things and other people try to remain oblivious. At a party for folk of different worlds, both the strangeness and the obliviousness can reach surreal proportions. People milled about George’s knees, occasionally tossed a quip up at her, occasionally didn’t, and drifted on.

  ‘I would like to be a ruler, a president, or a mangler!’ Alsrod announced beneath her sister’s smile.

  ‘And I would like to be a poet.’ I laughed. ‘But I’m too far along in my life to start another profession1; and fortunately there are laws and institutions today to prevent rulers from becoming manglers, at least on Vondramach’s scale.’

  ‘Weren’t there laws and institutions two hundred years ago?’ Alsrod asked.

  Santine chimed in with one of her tongues in one of her more cajoling voices: ‘When one actually starts the historical research, it sometimes seems as though there weren’t. Now I have never been to another world, except once in a vaurine tour. Most likely, I’ll never go in vivo. Would you tell me: how do you find the flavour of the experience hangs in your mouth, my young wanderer?’

  ‘Well, with all this talk of poetry, it’s a shame to bring up a cliché, but a vaurine tour is more educational – and fun. And I suppose …’ (While Alsrod searched for the proper metaphor, I beamed all astral thanks to my old labour2-mate for letting me out of the frying pan.) ‘Well, a vaurine tour simply serves up richer, better prepared, and more carefully orchestrated flavours than live chance possibly could …’

  Without looking, I fingered another button on the book’s bottom to turn it off, and let the chain slide down through my fingers.

  Alsrod stepped out from under the foil epaulets Nea’s hands had become, to continue her conversation with Santine. (The book bumped against my calf.) Nea still stood, still smiled, and still kept up her hands, as though preserving a cave into which her sister might retreat should she accidentally and irreparably disgrace herself.

  An image: Fibermich and George, now that Alsrod had turned from me, coming together to join Nea in a toe-to-toe line for a precise and ordered bow. (Behind Nea I could see a stone cyhnk that had been brought here from the Arvin to decorate the room how many decades ago now: Nea’s arms, in their fixed position, looked like two more of the religious symbol’s branches transferred from the living trunk.) But before I could find out if my vision was simply fantasy or social prediction, laughter exploded across the room.

  Thadeus Thant came towards us, followed by my sisters Bucepha
lus and Tinjo and my other sister, white-skinned and livid-eyed Maxa. A swarm of three-centimetre metallic discs careened in a suspensor field maybe a decimetre away from Thadeus’s body. Blue, gold, copper, silver, and black metal whizzed about; turned on low, the privacy cloud was a convocation of comets. Between, now and again, you could see within, up here an aged eyelid, down there a parchment kneecap, higher a collapsed pectoral with its folded dug. ‘What are you youngsters plotting over here? How are you planning to do in your parents this time?’

  We all laughed now.

  ‘We’re plotting to steal time itself from you,’ declared Fibermich. ‘We’re going to spike it to the floor as it slips by. And just as you come over to see why it’s so still, we’ll pull it out from under you – ’

  ‘– and send you spinning off around the galaxy’s edge,’ my sister Alyxander took it up, ‘on your grandest adventure yet, Thad!’

  ‘We’re planning to pluck all the best stars out of the sky and stuff them in our pockets,’ I said, ‘so that when we meet you once again and thrust our hands deep inside to hide our embarrassment, our fingertips will smart on them, as if they were desert grains, caught down in the seams, and we’ll smile at you on your way to a glory that, for all our stellar thefts, we shall never be able to duplicate.’

  ‘Respect!’ Thadeus said loudly, in that great, brassy voice – though the corporeal Thadeus always seemed so little inside the colourful cloud. ‘Yes, that’s respect!’ I believe this eldest of the three Thant mothers was honestly happy young Dyeths had taken time to learn at least some of the rituals from the polar geosector on a far, far world. ‘Now why don’t you – ’ Thadeus waved an arm towards us seated children, though I only glimpsed a wrinkled elbow, a vein curving a wrist. Bright metal swooped and careened – ‘you show the kind of respect these youngsters do,’ and comets flew on across the pulsing colours on the pastel floor to join more of our parents.