Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Delany, Samuel R.

  He said: ‘Relief, mostly. They told me you existed – I had to wait most of a standard year, learning how to be a person who might walk, speak, and listen in your world.’

  ‘Relief …’ I smiled. ‘Yes. I feel that too. They told me that you existed. And yet somehow my going on involved pretending you didn’t.’

  ‘All around the relief – ’ Korga’s wide heels hung from the back of each step as we climbed – ‘there is still anxiety. Yours, mostly. I sense it not as an emotional activity, but as a tenseness. Desire is still there; expectation is still there. A single orgasm in a single hour has not given me an answer.’

  Which made me gasp a little. ‘Yes, I feel that too …’ I pushed through the gate; he followed me. ‘And yet we’re both – you and I – very different people.’

  ‘We are both in very different situations.’

  ‘We’re both – ’ I started to say from very different worlds. ‘We are each likely to have very different feelings at what comes upon us as well. I know for myself – ’ I turned at the rail as he closed the gate behind him and stepped up to stand next to me: ‘I know I want to do wonderful things for you, because watching you, being near you, not to mention touching you or holding you, gives me so much pleasure. I suppose somewhere the rational part of me is wondering if perhaps the differences between us might not end up with my hurting over them, but …’

  After a strangely long while he said (and he was halfway through his sentence before I realized it was an answer to mine): ‘You give me so much pleasure, why should I ever want to hurt you?’

  Somehow I assumed, in the search for difference, we had found identical emotions. Somewhere across the rocks came the growing pedal-bass of a sand-scooter.

  I looked up to see if Korga was frowning at the sound. (He wasn’t.) ‘Rat, I think someone is …’ I leaned down on the rail, folding my arms and hunching my shoulders. Beside me Korga grasped the rail, arms straight, and didn’t lean at all.

  We looked across the clearing, beyond the night rocks, to distant Morgre’s glimmer. Purple threads luminesced palely over the Hyte. At the horizon a few clouds streaked jet against starry blue.

  First two scooters, then three more, bounced up over the rock ridge. All but one had two riders.

  6.

  ‘Here it is! Look! Here!’ one called.

  Scooters swerved, slowed, hummed.

  One and another they halted before the platform.

  The woman who’d called out was our retired med-tech2. She got off the plastic and silver and treads and foils that made up her shared mount. As others dismounted, the scooters leaned over on to their stands. The med-tech2 rubbed the silver filigree on her openwork head-protector and turned to look across the dark stones, out at the handful of glitter that was Morgre. ‘Yes, this is certainly the view I visited in vaurine. The commentary said, now, that, in the fourth generation of Dyeths, several of them established their personal living rooms in this area.’ She was reciting from a prospectus that she must have memorized with the help of General Info.

  ‘Do any of them still live here, Mima?’ asked one of the evelm students still seated with all six legs drawn up on her swaying bike.

  I nudged Korga’s hand with my elbow and grinned as he glanced at me.

  ‘Let me see … It doesn’t say anything about that in my program,’ the med-tech2, Mima, said. ‘But during the Bazerat productions, some of the younger Dyeths – Genya, Ari, or Maxa – would invite the performers and the technicians up here to rehearse. Special pentagonal platforms were built to facilitate the rehearsals.’ (Yes, mine/Ari’s is the only one left.) ‘Imagine, playmakers like Vhed’dik and Cy’yja, or actors like Kand’ri, Sejer’hi, or Jae’l Bazerat herself may have stood right here and declaimed the lines of the Priest Passmar’t, or the Worm Digger Avess, or the Human Ambassador David.’ (Kand’ri’s portrayal of the human David, without makeup or holographic assistance, is considered a high point in the illusionist art of the highly illusive theatre by evelmi and humans alike. Myself, though I’m impressed, I’ve always been more moved by the evelm actors’ clouds, rocks, winds, and oilslicks. But these have a millennium of oestern equatorial tradition behind them.) ‘Any one of them,’ repeated the diminutive Mima, ‘might have stood right where I’m standing now!’ Actually it was about two metres back, where Korga and I were leaning.

  A tall woman I didn’t recognize dismounted her scooter. She wore a black body mask, face to feet. One of the other human students turned to her and said:

  ‘It was very nice of you to rent these scooters for us so we could come out and explore the landscape. It’s left the taste of friendship in our mouths.’

  The tall woman said: ‘I am only too pleased to help the local students.’ Her voice had the faintly singsong quality of someone who had just learned the language through GI – a quality which, offworld, I hardly even noticed any more, but which I had found myself listening constantly for in Rat’s speech, only to find the gross deformation in both consonants and vowels that told of an awkwardly muscular attachment to a vanished language system I could not comprehend. ‘I am only sad,’ the woman went on, ‘that I have not yet met among your number the woman whose history particularly intrigues me. Well, as your study session goes on, perhaps one of you will introduce me. I intend to stay in Morgre for at least a week or so more. And I would like to spend as much time in your company as you would like to spend in mine.’ I wondered briefly if she were from one of the mining or manufacturing hegemonies further north.

  Korga’s and my shadows lay across the clearing among the shadows the students and their scooters cast in my platform’s lamplight.

  About a metre and a half away, right in front of the steps, one woman turned slowly in a full circle: ‘It’s astonishing! We’re here, all alone, with only history and the landscape.’

  As her eyes swept unseeing past ours, Korga looked at me, his features faintly unsettled on his deeply pocked face; I would soon learn that was as close to surprise as he got. ‘They don’t see us …?’

  ‘Nor our platform. Nor do they hear us.’ I chuckled through a smile. ‘That’s the chance you take, wandering the local countryside. You never know when you’re chatting about your innermost feelings right under somebody’s front porch.’

  ‘We’re invisible to them,’ Korga said. ‘The way the chamber was. Back in the amphitheatre.’

  I frowned. ‘Not exactly. In fact it’s entirely different. The reason they can’t see or hear us is because they’re there, up in the hills, ten kilometres out from Morgre, and we’re still in Dyethshome – which is just at the edge of Morgre complex itself.’ I pointed over the students’ heads to the far city. ‘If it were a little lighter, you could make out the three stained-glass walls around the amphitheatre … right about … there. Ten kilometres off. Which is where we are – right now.’

  Korga looked down at the students in front of us. He said in a perfectly normal voice: ‘The spiders who sent me here said that I must study such things while I am here at Dyethshome and learn to grow comfortable in such a technology.’ Most people when they speak in front of people who can’t see them whisper.

  ‘What a wonderful rise that looks like over there.’ One of the evelm, her steel-coloured claws indistinct in the evening light, reared beside her scooter and pointed (with her longest tongue). ‘Let’s go take a look at the view from there,’ she said (with one of her others), ‘and maybe we can catch the big moonrise.’

  ‘You’re sure you’re not ready to go back to town?’ The algae farmer2 on the far scooter stuck out her own human tongue towards Morgre. (I’ve heard northerners say we southerners – human – who point like that just seem affected.) ‘I’ll just take one of the scooters back by myself. You can all double up …’

  ‘Oh, no!’ declared the rather hefty evelm, stepping about on five of her six claws.

  ‘Please come with us,’ said the tall masked human with the GI singsong.

  And the evelm: ‘Pleas
e come. But then, of course …’ Evelmi are a lot stronger physically than humans; and, in most of their societies, a lot more easygoing. The first is hereditary, the second cultural; and the interplay of both with humans from two profoundly different agricultural-intensive worlds has produced the tragedy of the north.

  The big farmer2 laughed. ‘All right, I’ll go,’ and she flung her high-booted leg back over the scooter seat.

  As the scooters swerved off towards another fine view of the star-lit Vyalou, I found myself thrown back through the many rides, night and day, I had taken over this landscape. ‘Rat,’ I said, ‘why don’t you come with me – ’

  ‘I should go back to the other students now,’ he announced, almost as I spoke. His own thoughts had been turning among his own feelings, behind his still face.

  ‘No, I don’t mean now. Tomorrow. Come dragon hunting with me. Tomorrow morning. You want to become comfortable with our technology, and I can’t think of any better way. Go back to the other students. I’ll meet you in the student quarters just at – ’ I paused. ‘What month is it now?’ (Those words, spoken or thought, are the signal for GI to play the time, day, week, month, and year across your consciousness by direct cerebral access: And it was ten o’clock of a balmy Yumber night, the seventeenth month of our seven-season year of twenty-five thirty-one-day cycles.) ‘Yes, just at sunrise. That’s what we’ll do. You go on now – ’ It was only because I was imagining seeing him again that I could dare tell him to go – and the telling was pain: something dull throbbed behind my knees. Above my testicles and between my shoulder blades, there seemed to be two pulleys, with a taut cable between, trying and failing to wind in opposite directions.

  He looked at me, took a little step back. (His little step was the size of my normal one.) ‘Marq …’ Korga’s beardless and cratered face was lit sideways by the orange orrery light that I knew was shining down on my own, bearded and smooth. One after the other, his face did not achieve three expressions. His knee, suspended nearly a metre above his wide and horny foot, moved – bone under flesh. I watched the small, rough triangle of drier skin that humans, male and female, develop after age thirty-five a centimetre below the patella in a naturally selective response to some environmental condition vanished now a millennium.

  He stood by the chair where his pants lay.

  Suddenly he raised one hand to the other. Finger struggled with finger. One ring came off. He pulled off another three.

  What did I feel? Numb terror. And what numbed finally sent the terror itself below perception’s limen, so that all I saw was dim or brilliant stone, dull or bright metal, rough or wrinkled flesh occluded and occluded.

  He dropped a handful of rings on his rumpled pants, pulled off the remaining three.

  And put them down.

  ‘Marq Dyeth …?’

  I wanted to tell him to go back to the others. I wanted to raise my hands to his wide shoulders. And while I wanted, his own hands came up to cage the sides of my head in his rough palms, his hard fingers. And I raised mine.

  Both of us really naked for the first time, we made love.

  Some three hours later, he put on his pants, his rings, his belt; and left.

  9

  From Breakfast to Morning

  I pushed up the sarbdown sleeping mat – local shoots sewn in an envelope (green) manufactured off in one of the more abhorrent northern pits. Iirianilight, shattered by cactus trunks, rouged the carpet, the desk drawer handles, the bed legs. I thought: ‘Today I am going dragon hunting!’ – remembering when I’d first thought it, age seven, my first hunt; and when I’d thought it, aged twelve and just back from Senthy, my seventh; and why this hundred twenty-sixth would be different – ‘We will hunt! We will sing!’

  I walked to the platform’s west edge. Light fell between the thicker trunks. Hands apart, I grasped the rail and looked over. A small, nine-shelf lizard perch was built out from the platform base – the kind they use in the eastern mountains. The palm-sized shelves, of redpith, silver, and bone, were kollec-four – the pidgin term from the forecasting process evelm hunters have used about five thousand years now in our several climes. Kollec-four: four finger-length lizards had, by now, availed themselves of the ornate inlaid platforming. The little lizards are, evolutionarily speaking, close cousins to the great beasts we would pursue – and rather more distant cousins to the evelmi who first hunted them.

  The hunters invoke complex divinations using the perch: from the sex of the small beasts found on it at sunrise, which platform they perch on, which direction they face, old hunters will predict the plan of the day’s foray, each other’s life-fate, and the governmental policies of their tribes and federations. Fine points vary from area to area. But what I knew was simply that when winged neutar lizards squat on the upper silver or bone (cooler, of course, than the dark pith lower down), it means spawning is less than two nights off and all three sexes of the greater dragon will be clustering around the nesting spas; if, however, little females crawl on the dark-coloured lower platforms, male and neuter dragons aplenty will be flapping and flopping over the feeding grounds – no, I’m not sure why it works, though it’s been explained to me enough times.

  Three of the lizards on the red platforms near the bottom had the female gilded gill-ruff. The fourth, a wingless male, was climbing down from bone to wood, flickering pale tongues, stepping about on six single-spurred feet: a day for the feeding grounds – which are more picturesque than the spas anyway.

  I turned to the metal plate bolted in the carpet’s corner that would become, at my will and silent incantation, the entrance column.

  I walked to it.

  I thought. Light rose. I fell into the foggy corridor.

  I walked along tapestried halls, or ones with web-hangings that had once decorated distant evelm cave complexes.

  There are stairways up to the amphitheatre.

  I climbed one, came out a side kiosk looking over the stage, and strolled out on the boards.

  In the grey light, a warm breeze anticipated hotwinds. Arms folded, I ambled before the stone steps at the stage-back up to the west-court arch. I looked over the empty seats fanning from me, to the freestanding walls of ornamental glass, their panes dull, now Iiriani was before them. The kiosk down to the student quarters was behind the bank of fountains at the stage’s north edge. As I came around the stone rim, I almost tripped over a mat stretched out before the door.

  ‘Oh, excuse me – !’ She sprang up (the jyga-jewellery student), blinking and remembering to smile. ‘Oh, hey, Marq … !’ Around her neck she wore the streamers that over the past few years I had seen from time to time in the streets of Morgre and that – for the past few days – I now knew came from Beresh. ‘You’ve come to take Korga hunting!’ She sank back to her knees. ‘That’s going to be wonderful for him. I wish we could all go with you … to watch him at the dragons. But …’ She arched her gumridge.

  I smiled back, confused: I hadn’t meant to keep it secret …

  ‘Oh, here! Let me move my bed so you can … we just thought it would be a good idea if someone slept out here in case anyone came in to see him who wasn’t …’ She shrugged scaly haunches. ‘Well, someone who wasn’t supposed to.’ With the edge of the mat in both front claws, she dragged it a few feet back from the door, dropped it.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Sure.’ Still smiling, still confused, I walked into the kiosk and down the spiral stair. The first chamber, with its stalactites and cool pools, was a replica of the antechamber of the cave of the P’ol’d of Q’ik’har, a great (evelm) Senator of the north, whose incredible complex, built eight hundred years ago, Shoshana says, has influenced architecture all over this world – human as much or more than evelm. As I came down beneath the dim dawn colours of the skylight, the inlaid steps widened; and I recalled, as I so frequently did in this hall, a conversation I once had with a famous v’ea’d (the ’d is the same root word as in P’ol’d and means something between professor emeritus, systems a
nalyst, and black widow) from one of the seven hundred university-chains that wind from federation to federation over the surface of this world and through which the classical evelm education is disseminated. The v’ea’d had told me, as we strolled the night-time crags of G’groth, below which smoked the Z’yz-wr: ‘That we evelmi can, with many of our tongues, reproduce sounds you humans will accept as language has probably generated as much evil as it has good between our species. The real affinity between us is that all our myriad cultures, and all yours, are founded on love of illusion. It is not that we both talk, but that we both talk endlessly of persons, places, things, and ideas that are not currently before us to taste. It is not that we both build home-caves, construct travel-guiders that stretch for thousands of kilometres over the land, lay out social grounds, or put together musical compositions and complex combinations of food and flavoured stone, but that we both build, construct, lay out, and put together these things according to plans, visions, imaginative schemes that, until we have realized them, have no real existence.’ She flicked her wings, whose lining was a dun and greenish bronze that had blacked in the big moon’s light. ‘In the north, Marq Dyeth, I have been in raiding parties that have slaughtered you humans, as humans have slaughtered my sisters, my university colleagues, my male groomers and females whom I have groomed. There is no peace between human and evelm. It is only an illusion I am in love with as much as you, and it is what allows us to walk and talk together here in the south on this chill evening.’ As I went down, seeking Korga, how many worlds, I wondered, how many ways of life had suddenly made the transition to illusion, to mere memory, to meaning without referent? I stepped from the bottom step and looked over the underground lakes (and though history had more or less absolved the P’ol’d, she had been none too fond of those university-chains by the end of her reign) and started over the clay floor towards the dormitory.