Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Delany, Samuel R.

  ‘Only one of us – Ynn – had bothered to learn any of the local Rhyonon languages in the minutes before we’d taken off. You and I, Marq, would have probably considered Rhyonon a fairly primitive place. They didn’t have a General Info system, for what seemed to be essentially religious reasons. They’d even been trying to legislate against the one the Web had set up on their nearer moon and not succeeding. On one of the few strings of cubes lying around that hadn’t melted beyond decipherment, on which they did their hieroglyphic insect-scratchings, Ynn found mention of a hermetically self-sealing underground refrigerator and storage crypt. Should we investigate? (Since the air was too thick to see through, inside what remained of the building, we watched each other in stereo schemas formed of little coloured squares, reduced from infrared reflections, on stereo face plates inside our masks.) Why not? Back outside, where everything was scrimmed with dirty gold, and the stereo plates could be raised for simple glass – as long as you weren’t trying to make out details on anything more than a metre away – we hauled out the excavators. The blades dropped, began to churn sand. And that’s when Marta, inside the ship for something, called out that the biodetectors, which till now we’d all but forgotten, were blipping and pinging like mad.

  ‘Something was down there – and alive!

  ‘Marta’s first guess was that it was some kind of plankton farm below – perhaps the bacterial decay that had gotten started on the remains of some par-boiled algae. But the fine-tuning on the detectors told us the major form was almost certainly animal, not vegetable. Mice? was Ynn’s suggestion – they’ve gone with humanity everywhere else. Fleas? Some local paramecia who’d managed to escape frying? We tunnelled and delved, furious as banshees, at the same time refusing to believe what the detector – with each ton of sand and slag the excavator’s blade heaved up over the crater’s rim – was insisting. You have no idea what it’s like to come upon something the size of a world where less than a day ago there were a quarter of a billion people, only to discover that now everything even resembling a molecule of ATP has been reduced to salts, gas, and water. Marta was putting up heat screens and clean-air traps as fast as Ynn could push away the rubble with the excavator. Using relay lines to the lunar GI system – the local signal jammers had been knocked out by the catastrophe – we’d all managed to become experts in any number of fancy rescue and medical techniques over the previous three hours. I was darting in and out of our ship, looking over the edge of the pit – swirling with smoke – then running inside again to see it on the screen in infrared, which cut out all the haze and where you had the advantage of being able to vary the focal length. “We’re through!” Ynn called over the earphones; and Marta brought in her last bubble-dome, digging various polyisoprene walls well down in the sizzling sand. (I was out again.) Through plastic panes I saw sand fall inward.

  ‘What came out into the bubble was immediately analyzed and the bubble itself was flooded with a gas mixture five degrees cooler and ten per cent richer in oxygen – we figured no matter what was in there in the line of animal life, that would have to be an improvement. Then we were scrambling down ourselves and through the floppy plastic envelopes, with all sorts of suspensor stretchers, medical kits, flares, and stun-guns bobbling along behind us. In our great mittens, we climbed down through the welter of twisted pipes and cracked masonry, shooting cool air around us with super-handy-dandy portable air conditioners. It was over forty degrees in there when we went in. We sent out beams of white, blue, and green light among the collapsed lattices of crumpled supports and broken pipes. It had been seven minutes since we got the first life-reading – but we’d all been working with x5 time-dilation drugs, which had made it seem to us just over a leisurely half-hour. Yellow, orange, and red beams converged. In the resultant glow, we saw, not moving, under a scatter of rubble, a leg.

  ‘Ynn set loose a handful of diagnostic bugs that attacked our find like killer bees. But even as we were closing in, it was pretty clear that something fairly awful had happened.

  ‘I started to say something was pinning the leg down –

  ‘But, frankly, there wasn’t much leg left. Twenty seconds later (divided by five) the bugs reported, on the little screens flickering on the left sides of our vision plates: our survivor was also blind.

  ‘Other reports were coming back now from the host of analyzers flitting and humming around the crypt, taking their readings and making their correlations: sometime in the first few minutes of the catastrophe, one of ten giant refrigeration coils had ruptured and for seconds the space had been flooded with fluorine, before the gas had been removed, a minute later, by the sluggish purifiers, their efficiency hugely reduced by the high heat. Fortunately, for most of that minute, the survivor had not been breathing – otherwise the trauma to the mucous membranes of the respiratory system alone would have been fatal. That minute, by the bye, was to give us a lot of trouble over the next few days.

  ‘But we got our survivor bubbled, sedated, aerated, and suspensored. In the midst of sealing up the plastic shield over the stretcher, there was some ghastly, basso grunt that threatened to topple towers and shatter eardrums – a human groan, but to us, thanks to the drugs, five octaves lower than uttered.

  ‘Then we were pushing the stretcher along and up between broken ledges. Outside the shield, flying dust had already peppered the transparent plastic with enough grit to blacken whatever we had been able to see before in the grey and mustard mists. And time-compressants were winding us down from the dilation drugs. (More than ten minutes is bad for your heart – and terrible for your kidneys.) In the sealed stretcher tube, the fellow was already being ministered to by threads of light that had pretty well woven around what was left of that right leg, growing a new one for him from the remains of the old. We got the stretcher out of the envelope flap, floated it across the sands (I swear the dunes had been blown into entirely different shapes in the minute we’d been down) and through our ship lock. Bubbles coursed the pale gold liquid that filled the container, carrying newly cloned cells to the proper locations and flushing away the damages. The survivor …’

  ‘Japril,’ I said, after moments when she had remained silent. ‘I’ve heard that term before. Now you’ve said it, I have to say: I can’t believe that over the surface of an entire world, any catastrophe short of the whole planet’s physically blowing up could manage to do in every member of the population with only one exception –’

  ‘The survivor was, by now, being monitored and observed by twelve hundred other rescue workers still searching and quartering Rhyonon’s steaming, storm-scoured surface, looking for others with one added grain of hope lent by our success.’ (Yes I was thinking: You could bring in twelve hundred workers to look for survivors in one undersea magma-mine disaster. A world …?) ‘Our ship lurched up, and we rose above that noxious desert, bearing what we would soon learn was a hugely ruined creature, healing now in our biotic tubs.’

  ‘And you brought her here,’ I said. ‘Which is to say – there, where you are. But why are you –’

  Japril’s foreknuckles came together on the gold bar. (A work of art? A medical device? A child’s toy?) ‘We’re talking of this survivor – the survivor that concerns you.’

  5

  Rescue Continued

  ‘Japril,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why I keep asking. But I suppose it’s because the implied answer just always seems wrong. Tell me – or tell me why the Web doesn’t want me to know: exactly how many survivors were there from Rhyonon?’

  ‘Marq,’ she said, ‘you should know if anyone does: it’s your question that’s impossible. Three thousand volunteers in a colonial ship bound for the Mie-t&t VII colony had left Rhyonon’s surface six hours before the holocaust commenced. All of them are alive today; and none of them knows what’s happened to her former home. Were they survivors? There are thousands upon thousands more, born on Rhyonon over the last hundred years, who now live on a moon or a world or an O’n-colony circling some moon
or world, having left a day or a year or a decade ago. Are they survivors? Or the how-many from other worlds, other moons, within hours or minutes or days of visiting or returning to Rhyonon, whose flights were then cancelled – not to mention the seven hundred and fifty-eight incoming offworld flights that we were able to deflect, within minutes of the disaster’s commencement, to moons or other planets. Were they survivors?’

  ‘What about the five, or fifty, or five hundred you couldn’t?’

  Japril got that angry look I’ve always liked her for. ‘I could give you two answers. First, it’s not my department. Second, there were two-hundred-seven of those. In seventeen cases, the Web was actually able to effect some midair transfers of passengers and crews that, if there’s going to be any excitement about the Rhyonon rescue operations, ought to be at the centre of it.’

  ‘All right, Japril,’ I said. ‘I hear what you’re saying. With a population as large as a world can have and a disaster of Cultural Fugue proportions, “survival” becomes a kind of fuzzy phenomenon; it’s not the hard-edged fact of local fires, floods, and hurricanes. Go on and tell me about my relations to – ’ I laughed. ‘You know, I’d started to say “my” survivor.’

  ‘Our survivor,’ Japril said ruefully, ‘presented a host of medical problems, once we lifted that bruised and ruptured half-corpse off the steaming silt and sand and slag that was, now, much too much of Rhyonon.

  ‘When we got a full diagnosis of the blindness, we thought we had hit the major medical hurdle.’ (Something General Info has returned to us: one or two people can see a whole project through from start to finish, even if various stages in it demand three or four or fifty fields of extensive specialized knowledge. That the Web is the most constant utilizer of the newest facets of GI should be no surprise. They invented it.) ‘The whole front orbital surface, of both whites and corneas, was corroded – thanks to that fluorine. And inside, the retinas had been perforated in half a hundred places and the humours generally congealed as solid as boiled albumin – which can be dealt with. But the interior eyeball lining had become granulated and would clearly become a suppurating hive of problems in no time, even if all the works were restored. You can’t deal with that. Which meant the eyes themselves had to be replaced. Ynn suggested a Rhyonon-manufactured optical prosthesis might be best. There were actually some around, since we were only a moon away. Marta hit up GI for some quick courses in optical surgery and wired them in … Under dim light, Marq, the new eyes looked like black-backed globes of clear glass. In ordinary light, they are your usual, faintly veined white with irises of a green substantially more vivid than the true irises originally were. In bright light they turn a disquieting silver. You know –’ Japril frowned – ‘there’s an odd thing about the sociology of prosthetic devices. When a culture first develops the technology to counterfeit a human function, the counterfeit is usually awkward and jarring. But when the culture reaches a technological stage beyond that, the prostheses are made to look as much like the original organ as possible. Now when a stage beyond that is reached, suddenly the prostheses are consciously constructed to call attention to themselves in aesthetically interesting ways. In fact, limited technological stages can be meaningfully described as exhibiting just such variations as I’ve –’

  ‘Japril,’ I said, ‘you are telling me, in your own inimitable way, Rhyonon’s culture had reached a level two stages beyond that needed to create a functional optical prosthesis. But we only have a limited amount of conference time. You haven’t told me –’

  ‘We set the survivor’s waking for an hour after our own the next day. Rest is still the best cure for that kind of bodily trauma: new leg, new eyes. We came into the rotunda of the rescue station here, wondering if the pale blue walls and the wall window, beyond which sprawled only lunar schist and craters, were really conducive to the best revival. Had we done certain neurological tests? Certainly. Had we done others? Well, now … we’d done enough to determine that we had no major deficiencies to deal with. There were signs of the most minor prenatal brain damage that may have been due to potassium starvation in the bearing parent. But neural paths had been established by normal growth to compensate. We had neither a genius nor an idiot on our hands. That we knew. How did we go about telling someone in the huge range we humans have generally set out for ourselves as normal that their world is … gone?

  ‘A hundred lights, each a different colour, died in the froth of glycerine that washed about that human-shaped bath. Tubes drained off the puce and fuchsia biles that, in a sort of antidigestive process, had, by their chemical actions, healed; had, by their tidal actions, exercised. Molecular gradients were read across sheets of tissue; neural charges were positioned down to the synapse and detonated.

  ‘The right arm twitched.

  ‘For a moment the left hand’s knuckles were four bubbly islands in the trough’s syrup. A knee flexed from thick liquid.

  ‘Then, dripping, the survivor sat.

  ‘You understand, Marq, I had never seen such a waking, but GI had given me the recalls to call on of seventeen experts who’d each watched this process many times – watched the coughing, the shaking head, the neural twitches as the nerves came on again, the unsteady motor orientation of an old nervous system taking over a radically reprocessed body, the ten-to-twenty minutes’ limping to accommodate the inevitable discrepancies in neural firing times of the nerves in the new leg, the two-to-five hours of increased blinking to acclimate to the just-connected optic nerve.

  ‘The survivor sat, to the waist, in foam.

  ‘The survivor coughed.

  ‘The survivor raised both hands and, with two thick and awkward forefingers, rubbed away the juices from each lid in a single downward motion. The tub began to tip, and Ynn automatically stepped forward to give a hand, that, clearly, as our healed creature stepped forward among the railings and handholds now, was not needed.

  ‘There was no stagger at all.

  ‘The eyes – bright green under our lights – were wide. With all that lubricating syrup, physiologically there is no need to blink for a full three minutes. Still almost any human waking from such a bathing blinks. A lot.

  ‘The survivor didn’t; but rather looked about. Marta made a gesture with her hand beside her face that showed she was empathizing with the queasiness we knew was being felt but, nevertheless, did not show. With a supporting ring in each large hand – so very tall – the survivor stood, for all the world (the world …? which world?) like someone waiting. No questions, no curious glances, no self-orienting looks; naked thighs streamed, and the drain gurgled behind wide heels.

  ‘I said softly to Ynn: “Perhaps that brain damage …?”

  ‘Ynn said sharply: “Who are you? Tell us your name. We want to help you,” in the most common of Rhyonon’s six languages. We knew that twenty-four per cent of Rhyonon’s population was – or had been – bilingual, with the most common language either the first or second tongue of that three-quarters.

  ‘The survivor was looking somewhere between Marta and me … not with any particular intensity. Still, because that face so clearly wasn’t paying attention to what Ynn was saying, it made me want to look over my shoulder to see what those eyes were seeing, even though I knew it was only blue plastifoam.

  ‘Ynn said: “Who are you? Tell us your name. We want to help you,” in the second most common of Rhyonon’s six languages.

  ‘The survivor said: “Korga the Porter … Rat …”

  ‘The last was a term I didn’t know, though by now I’d been programmed with four advanced courses in Rhyonon linguistic patterns – enough to locate that accent as a pidgin version of the speech associated with the urban equatorial slums. Though just which slum, I couldn’t tell.

  ‘The survivor still didn’t look at us.

  ‘There was something about … the height, the roughness of the body, the stubble darkening the male jaw, the unexpectedly steady gaze of those eyes we had just given – ’

  ‘For
a moment, Japril – ’ I laughed – ‘I thought you were going to tell me my relation to this character was that I happened to be her perfect look-alike, or perhaps among six thousand worlds’ population, we happen to have turned out genotypal twins. And male, you say. I’d just assumed –’

  ‘Rough, black hair,’ Japril went on, ‘sun-darkened skin … from what we know of Rhyonon’s demographics and colonizations records, chances are almost thirty per cent of the ancestry was white. The face, Marq, was uneven and pitted – ’

  ‘Sounds like the scars of a very rare disease called acne,’ I volunteered. ‘When I was ten, I encountered a population where it was rife. On that moon, in fact, both the males and the females considered it a mark of great distinction –’ which was not quite accurate. ‘I’ve always agreed.’

  Japril’s smile said more things than I could read in it. ‘There was something about that face – though I only thought about how to express it later. Consider a mask of terra cotta. Now take a jeweller’s hammer, strike it from behind, then, before the first cracks appear on the surface, catch a picture from the front. There was that about the face, Marq. The survivor stepped forward, now, unsteadily. The disorientation we expected from fear, from displacement, from remembered terror at whatever had happened a world, two eyes, and a leg ago was just not there. ‘Those eyes now looked at Ynn, at Marta, at me.

  ‘Over seven feet tall: two heads taller than me and almost as tall as Ynn; and the distinctions among those long, long muscles were different from the ones a woman’s take on in a gymnasium programme to bring out the body lines.

  ‘I’ve seen worlds where women’s physical labour was a prime commodity. The physicality was much more like that than such a –’

  ‘And I’ve seen women from labour-intensive geosectors on low technology, or unevenly dispersed technology, worlds, Japril. You make this survivor very vivid to me.’