Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Delany, Samuel R.

  We leaned forward, slid down the ramp – the union disappeared (Korga’s hands were momentarily iron on my flanks); and the view without and within the shield matched.

  We rumbled into the tunnel.

  Left of us, behind the mesh fence, the transport roller-way carried stacks of cargo at twice our speed. Right of us, a few more scooters scooted through; and once a covered kar overtook us and moved up ahead to disappear in the tunnel lights’ changing patterns.

  I felt Korga move closer in behind me. Later I reflected on how well he took the curves – not like someone whose first scooter ride this was; and I’ve ridden with my share of those, evelmi and human. The tunnel curved and straightened around us. We curved. We straightened.

  Through the air rush, I heard him speaking down at my ear: ‘Those radar-bows are confusing objects. They are strange weapons.’ And as we neared the tunnel’s end and the true light of the desert opened over us, I realized suddenly Korga had no idea what, in a dragon hunt, we hunted.

  10

  A Dragon Hunt

  More mica than sand.

  With such an erosive climate, how does this land sustain so many edges? I’d asked the question as a child. General Information had let me over-lick several explanations, all of which centred about the geological forces underlying the markings and measurings of three-thousand-kilometre rock-plates floating and crashing (oh so slowly, over millions of years standard) above magma, as they tend to do on woman-sized worlds. To skim the mica sandshifts – these ten centimetre ledges that worm the upper plateaus, over which silver falls in veils – was for me to traverse all the informative forces below that underwrite this landscape.

  Down a cliff ragged with purple fungi, the Old Hunter moved by boulders, her daykit lashed between her wings with rags. Rags are human-made; our daykit was tied to the scooter’s guide bar with the traditional yellow cord of fine braided cactus fibre. Cultural contamination? Cultural exchange? I’ve thought both over the years; I will think both again.

  I halted the humming scooter, leaned it over, and got the triple stand stamped properly into the sand.

  The sails on our bows wavered either side. The bowstrings buzzed notes too low for even dragons to hear. I kicked my foot out and swung my leg over the seat. The sand was still cool from the morning chill; kilometres away, a few twenty- and thirty-metre needle-rocks spoke of velmological happenstance.

  Korga, all shoulders, knees, knuckles, and heels, dismounted, carefully awkward.

  I grinned at him.

  He gripped the handrail. Iiriani smouldered and exploded in his rings as he held it, dulled in his palm’s callus as he released it.

  ‘There’s been good cliff-purchase as well as sage-signs for a couple of kilometres now,’ I told him. ‘We should find sizeable dragons feeding.’ Microscopic and blue, sage is what dragons eat, and the cliffs, in the distance, rising broken, black, and yellow, are where they go to eat it. Korga stood beside the scooter, his broad hand on the bow sail, once more looking like a human hunter born in the brace and handles. ‘This is good hunting territory, Marq?’

  ‘For what we want, we could probably hike a little further to the –’

  Crunching over the heavy lichen at the road rim, the Old Hunter raised her dusty snout. She blinked her black eyes slowly, only tongue tips tasting in the dry air the dust that dulled her upper lipbone.

  Korga turned to look, leaving his hand where it was. And what had been a brave stance, by the simple movement, again was comical. I saw the Old Hunter lick that awkwardness with her eyes and not change her expression.

  That’s why I loved her.

  She extended one tongue: ‘You women are going hunting.’

  I nodded; and still wished she’d look away – or Korga would. ‘I guess so,’ and laughed, finally able not to care, with another memory of my own first hunt. ‘How’s the catch been?’

  Her head wagged a little. ‘Nothing so far. But there’re dragons to sing of over oestwards.’ Her wings, without unfolding, hunched up on her back. She came up another few steps, claws too dusty to tell her origin, their points blunted by the sand she lived on.

  She lifted her foreclaws a bit and raised her head, looking over our equipment. ‘Hello, young hunter.’ That was to Rat. ‘Where do you come from?’

  Rat moved his hand a little down the sail. ‘Another world.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Old Hunter said. ‘I’ve heard of such among you humans. Is your world in the north?’

  The young hunter in me jumped to explain. But the older one put her hand on my shoulder (where Korga’s hand had so recently calmed me), and I watched.

  ‘My world …’ He paused, turned, and looked at our sun – his eyes momentarily blinded me. The afterimage, as I turned now, starred the landscape black. Rat pointed about thirty degrees above the horizon – ‘is there, about seventeen-point-three-four-two thousand light-years away.’ Sun in a red stone on his forefinger vied with the mirrored balls under his lids. I wondered if galactic orientation were also within those rings.

  ‘That’s where the tiny yellow dragon flies.’ Her lip ridge arched and other tongues came out to try the tastes we laid on the air. ‘The yellow dragon.’ Two indicator tongues came close together, miming ‘tiny’, which Rat, I knew, would miss. ‘Your world. Yes. I taste your meaning, young hunter.’

  The tiny yellow dragon is an imaginary beast and part of a minor but famous and rather complicated local myth cycle; I watched Korga hear it and not understand.

  ‘Your sweat leaves a strangely metallic taste on the air, young hunter,’ which, for the first few days after I came home from a mission1 in some artificial offworld environment, strange evelmi are always saying about me too, though my friends ignore it. I pondered how short a time he’d been here.

  ‘Well, while you are hunting dragons, I shall be hunting you. And maybe when we have finished our day, we can sing of our catch to one another.’ Her paws came down on the warm soil. ‘Remember, young hunter, as you aim through the sights and sails of your bow, I’ll have you centred through my sights and sails.’

  I pulled down the release strap of my bow brace; the bow slid towards me and I caught it by the haft.

  ‘You are Marq Dyeth.’

  I grinned, as pleased that she had recognized me this time as I had been the first time it had happened on my third hunt when I was a child. To evelmi most humans look pretty much alike. Those living with numbers of humans develop their strategies for telling us apart; and those who live for years in the same house with us have no more difficulty distinguishing us than we – who live with them – have distinguishing them. But the Old Hunter herself had once told me, years ago, that the only way she could tell one human from another was by how she held her bow. ‘Good luck to the two of you.’ Her spurs flexed above the sand.

  She turned away down the ridge.

  Korga was looking for the release strap. ‘Marq, what did she mean, she would be hunting us?’

  I pulled the last sail out of the brace’s sail slot. ‘She’s going back to her blind, where her bow and gear are stored. And she’s just letting us know that she’s going to be after us in exactly the same way we’re going to be after the dragons.’

  Korga stood. ‘Then she is our enemy.’ It wasn’t fear; but you could read fear into it. ‘We must avoid her, Marq. Perhaps this is not a good day for us to hunt –’

  ‘She’s our best friend in this world,’ I told him. ‘The Old Hunter, and hunters like her, are the reason that in some of the southern geosectors, evelmi and humans can live as one society. That’s not the strap you want, Rat. Pull the one below it.’

  Rat pulled.

  The bow brace swung out.

  The sails quivered, leaned –

  ‘Catch hold of the haft!’

  He did. And stood, the black-scored, light-absorbent sail rising by one shoulder, the white reflectant one by the other.

  ‘Remember how you were holding the bow back at the union? See if you can get i
t like that again – no, your left hand a little further forward. There. That’s more like it.’

  2.

  The Vyalou compresses immense variety into a landscape that always looks, from any one position, comparatively uniform.

  We stepped over silver-shot sift-ribbons. On foot, we wound the narrow paths between igneous boulders which had cracked in two, the coal-black faces veined with yellow schist. We crossed a natural bridge over a dry gully that had once been an underground river, left there by early human colonists, whose roof had caved in. We paused at a place where white blossoms the size of pinheads, which you had to look at from less than a dozen centimetres to make out their individual petals, lay across the sand, aping the north-polar frosts. We set our bows down on their three-jointed feet; I made Korga put his ear to the sand to hear the subvelmian thrum of waters crashing some seven metres down – in a newer colonial waterway, which an Old Hunter had assured me, in my fifteenth year, would too lose its roof and dry, oh … within three-quarters of a century.

  ‘There, look –!’

  Korga’s head came up, sand and mica on his ear’s curve.

  ‘– can you see her flying, towards the crag?’

  He squinted silver into the sun. ‘Yes …’

  The dragon disappeared behind the stone.

  ‘… I saw her flying.’ He brushed sand and mica from his cheek.

  I got up and hoisted my bow. ‘Let’s go on.’

  Korga hoisted his.

  We trudged.

  We crawled under a fallen sheet of elephant lichen (ancient gift of the Web); its dried crust lay over a gully so close to the ground I wondered if we could get our bows through.

  We did.

  We climbed a red-rock slope with its black and orange pittings.

  The dawn wind was steady south. Once I looked back to see, behind Rat, the Vyalou undulating away. The nearer sand-sifts were dark lines, now and then pricked with light.

  ‘Around here and down …’

  Rat caught up to me. I moved nearer to the ridge, parked my bow beside me on the rock, and leaned over. I heard Rat getting free of his own. Then his shoulder brushed mine; his rough hand came down half on stone and half on the back of mine.

  Directly ahead, three beasts lazed and gentled on the air.

  A wingless male was crawling down the rocks, going away.

  Much higher up, another dragon, like a bit of sloughed tolgoth bark caught in a wind-swing, dived back and forth before Iiriani. As a child, when I’d first seen such configurations I’d always assumed the high beast was keeping guard for the others. Usually there’d be two or three males around – then I saw there was a second male, clawing around an outcrop of reddish stone to the right, talons making pink puffs as she scrabbled.

  Two of the winged beasts planed towards one another and away.

  The females’ wings were wide as mechanical worm-strainers, half again the spread of their intelligent evolutionary cousins’ and well over twice the area. Ethologists have described them, as I now whispered to Rat, as small herds of land-bound males, from two to ten, who roamed the rockier areas; and small flocks of females, from three to fifteen, who hover for a day or ten around them, before taking off to find another herd – while a lone neuter, almost half again the size of the females, flies high overhead, her singular flight patterns initiating intercourse between all three as she carries her load of nongenetic reproductive information. About seventy-five per cent of the offspring are borne by the females, about twenty by the neuters, and five by the males. The male dragon birthing is violent, almost always injurious, and frequently fatal – it seems to be, evolutionarily speaking, on the way out. In the evelmi, only females and neuters carry – males sometimes have practically unnoticed abortions, though male births occasionally occur in folk tales and legends: it’s probably projection, not racial memory, though there are adherents to that theory, too, in the north. ‘The fertilized zygote,’ I went on, ‘can end up lodging in either of the three sexes, though only the females and neuters seem biologically equipped with an efficient way to get the infant out of the body. Mostly what the muscles that control their ‘wings’ really do is help in labour. People are still speculating on what environmental conditions nudged evolution in this direction sixty million years back when the pattern got established.’

  Rat pointed up at the highest flying beast. (Those immense hands could get dirtier quicker than anyone’s I’ve ever known!) ‘That’s the neuter …?’

  ‘I think …’ and squinted, ‘that’s probably a female. The neuters are usually much larger; and they fly so high you frequently can’t see them at all. Though that could be a younger neuter, coming down for a while …’

  His hand came back to my shoulder again. We watched, as one female dropped to the soil and, with thrashing wings, beat up a grey-black cloud whose curling edges paled purple and shredded. She leapt away through her own dust, turning and cawing, as the males lumbered over, first one, then the other, pausing at the falling dirt, then one and the other nuzzling it.

  ‘They’re going to eat any micro-sage or mural-fungi she’s turned up,’ I explained. ‘Good deal, huh? You want to take a few shots here, or look for a more active covey?’

  He turned to me with silver eyes and that blank expression I would eventually learn to read as gentle laugher. ‘You tell me, Marg.’

  ‘Well, maybe we …’ I gnawed on my back teeth. ‘But they’re going to be here a while. Let’s go on. If nothing better turns up, we can always come back.’

  Suddenly I was very aware of the heft of his hand, of the brush of his hip against my flank – he turned blazing eyes on me, his jawbone working behind pitted skin. So we stayed to make love, in our parked bows’ angular shadows. He came twice, I, once, and we joked about it. Later, both our hands wet with his urine, we lifted our bows and carried them across the irregularly darkened sand he’d paused at to pour. I looked around for the Old Hunter, wondering if she had shot us already from some ledge, fissure, or cliff-niche. But neither her wing’s dark sails nor her bow’s bright ones were visible above rock or ridge.

  We trudged on.

  We found another covey.

  We halted.

  Rock rose to the oest. The ridge rolled up west. Over the remaining 215 degrees, sand and bramble fanned down from our crevice.

  Dragons dived.

  Dragons soared.

  Three rose together, nipping at each other’s lips, wings working, turning above and below each other. One huge one tore loose and rose and rose and rose, till she was an ash of night flickering on the day.

  ‘That’s a neuter.’

  ‘She is much higher than the other one was.’

  Dust at half a dozen places drifted around dragon wings.

  ‘There’re at least nineteen in the covey.’

  ‘Twenty-one,’ Rat said.

  I nodded, wondering how he could count them that fast. Though it’s something I had seen old hunters do. ‘The activity’s good. The energy’s high.’ I hauled up my bow, got the brace around my neck, the stock into my arm. ‘Do you see one you like?’

  ‘You said,’ he said, ‘to pick one whose flight was beautiful.’

  I nodded: ‘Get your bow up.’ For a moment I really thought he was going to ask me: What is beautiful? ‘When you fire, try to think your own body into the same position as your quarry’s. That’ll make the transition less of a shock.’ I slid one hand forward on the brace, the other to the release.

  More slowly, he lifted his.

  ‘Got one all picked out?’

  He looked at me with eyes gone normal in the shadow of the rock beside us. We squatted together.

  Dragons worked in dust and sun out on the sand and above it.

  He fired first – I heard the release click; his body jarred, as though some subvelmian troll had sledged up at the ground under his feet. Rat looked at me in blank astonishment.

  ‘You missed, that’s all.’ As V’vish and Max had explained to me on
my first hunt, when I was seven, it’s pointless to try to prepare someone for the effect of either a miss or a hit. I said: ‘Better aim a little more carefully. You probably don’t want that to happen again.’

  He turned back to the flock.

  I sighted through the cross hairs. ‘When you pull the release, make sure it gets to the second click,’ I told him. ‘That throws in the automatic tracker and raises your chance for a hit by a factor of six or seven.’

  At the same time as I realigned on a far female arching magnificently behind low dusts, I heard his bow, raised towards a flying form above mine, click-click. Then the black and silver creature cleared the haze and darted up through my sights. I pulled – click-click – and threw myself through myself –

  – doubled in one sense, skewed in four others, my wings under-thundered grey sand in a dragon’s eye. Breast bunchings lifted. At the down beat of spiny wings, small bones bellied: hollow bones thrilled; my eyes shook with sand. Handless, high, bouncing in air six sets of claws could puncture, fluting through bone, I searched dragons for his eyes in hers, flapped through dust looking for his in his. (Sand burned my heels as I leaned back, twisted in bow thongs.) Amazed and lazy on the lifting gale of some other dragon’s wings, she soared. I sailed after, chasing him by chance. (It’s the feeling you can control your dragon’s body which is so strange, though it’s only because you know so well all she knows so well.) Double all syntax, wondering what his movements hold; she held to the air before me, and I spired away, spying some male below in which I was less interested than my hormones were. She turned on the spoke of a breeze, and my spine’s scales went quivery at the neuter beating above. Awareness in the splay and undulant vertebrae. The wing turned up in light like dust; lost in eyes with neither purple, rods, nor cones, the pattern of her dyed, and died on, my techtum. The more complex eyes of most velmian life see far more afterimages than we mammals: thus, we/they live under that different time her philosophers have storied. I saw her at a distance as a point-time event. I saw her up close as ten seconds’ history made synchronous by its multiple shadows. Rat, written all over her (at least to my tongue), rose up, flapping wings, body bending. I arched my hips down for other males under my belly. My mouth was big enough for the whole of this landscape, through which tongue, over and after tongue, licked and lusted. I rose and watched high dragons rise. Why do dragons fly, I mean according to them? Dragons and their hunters know: the nerve endings concentrated in the flesh below the joint of wing and body is of the same order as those in the human genitals or the lining of the human ear: the stimulation of rushing air excites them – the sensation dying at precisely the rate (established by ages of evolution) to make the wings flap enough for lift-off. A permanent around-the-body high? Fly! I flew. Dust settling on one of my tongues made a fine mud speaking of silver salts and tolgoth pollen which other females had passed over. I rose, torn from the dustbound males. My breast crawled, anticipating descent. Sex and hunger sweep round in the human body, through the day, failing and driving like unentailed tides, peaking together, or ranged in opposition: the drive that drags and pummels a dragon’s body towards the behaviour humans mistake for sex is almost three times as strong, far more pervasive, and concentrates in such different parts of the body – the pads of the middle set of claws, the flesh along the back culminating in two extraordinarily sensitive rings around the gills, the underside of the water-bearing tongue, and the upper side of the weakest taster – that humans, become dragon, sometimes cannot recognize it for hours. (Evelmi fare a little better, taking only minutes.) And there are two other drives that contour the actions of most trisaurian life, neither of them properly speaking hunger as humans know it. One is a yearning for a variety in tastes that can, if stifled, become true pain beating through the skull. The other is a gentle bodily urging towards certain kinds of motion. Together they can produce a behaviour that looks, to a human, like a creature satisfying a ravenous appetite – only something, perhaps the darting about to different substances as avidly as a human would devour one, is off. But knowing the dragon’s body from the inside is an adventure of a different order: in human women, hunger and desire, each sunk deep in the body, are always present, either as a full or an empty field. In the dragon the three drives, the one raging, the other two at sift and drift, in their various rhythms, are inconstant. Afterimages of Iiriani arched and lingered, paler and paler, as it went further down, mapped against my oscillate rise. I glimpsed the wider wings of the neuter above, and chills detonated my spine; my gills erupted rings of excitation, and I arched away, borne under the beat of other urges, to drop through the world built in my mouth, while Rat, at my shoulder, rose, her wings wild over, a racket on all, all over our aural techta, the single sensory unit at cerebral surface that, neurally congruent, women and dragons share –