Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Delany, Samuel R.

  ‘I was a dragon …’ he said, voiceless enough for a whisper. ‘I was a dragon? … I was a dragon! It was as if, for a moment, for a year, I was a dragon myself. I didn’t stop standing here, but I …’

  ‘The radar-bow hooks on to a pretty complete mapping of the dragon’s cerebral responses and, after a lot of translation, plays it back on your own cerebral surface.’

  ‘Was it twenty minutes? An hour? I … I couldn’t tell how –’

  ‘About seven seconds is the maximum it can hold. Your shot was probably two and a half to three seconds. That’s about what a good beginner manages. But there’s a time disorientation factor.’

  ‘– how long I was a dragon. But I was!’

  ‘Yes, you were.’ I glanced at the higher rocks behind us, where the Old Hunter was removing her bow and drawing in her wings, settling back below her rocky rim; for the same seconds, she had been an alien male hunting dragons on her own world.

  ‘It’s like reading,’ he said. ‘It’s like reading a –!’

  But I didn’t understand and turned instead.

  Korga turned to look where I looked.

  I guess he saw her – and understood.

  He raised his bright hand to hail her. Sunlight cut his forearm where it cleared the shadow of the boulder I still crouched by.

  ‘Hey, Rat?’ I stood. ‘Are you ready to sing of your catch?’

  His human eyes locked on mine, perplexed.

  ‘Eventually, we’ll actually run into the Old Hunter – or maybe someone else.’

  ‘I waved to her. Why didn’t she …?’

  ‘She probably just wasn’t ready to sing about it yet. When we do run into someone, they’ll sing to us of the quarry they’ve caught. We’ll sing to them.’

  ‘The Old Hunter will sing about … being us?’

  I nodded. ‘There’re hundreds of traditional songforms to cover the traditional forms of the experience. Those from the last three hundred years that deal with evelmi hunting humans – to be sung to human hunters – are among the most beautiful. But I’m biased. Anyway, you can deal with it any way you want. Amateur enthusiasm is always appreciated. And most hunters don’t even attempt the traditional forms until after their seventh or eighth hunt.’ (Was I going to tell him that, precocious me, on my third I’d improvised a perfect single-voiced kahoud’di’i’mar, whose syllabic counts, sound repetitions, and alliteration patterns I will eventually set out for you? Vondramach Okk, on one of her visits here, became interested in some of our local song forms. She wrote a set in her private language, including a kahoud’di’i’mar, which is actually where I learned it. She also wrote about them in her journal – on the same page with her notes on possible assassination techniques for Secretary Argenia.) ‘If you’d be more comfortable with it, I’ll teach you a short, traditional piece that will certainly do if we run into anyone.’ Three years ago, we’d taken some Thants on a dragon hunt. The catch had been superb, but the singing had been one of the traumatic confusions that can only happen between world-widened cultures. ‘It would only take me about three minutes to teach you a ditty that –’

  His eyes turned to the naked ridge. ‘I would rather wait and hear you first. And perhaps the Old Hunter.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, hoisting up my bow. ‘Sounds fine with me.’ The evelmi have high tolerance for the enthusiastic human amateur giving some local custom a go; in the north it’s probably one reason for the trouble, just as here it is the reason for the peace. But that tolerance has taught me much of use for my profession1.

  Korga squatted to get his ringed hand under the haft, his bare one around the neck brace, and stood up with it.

  We walked till we found another covey. And, with enthusiasm, I made two more shots – for there are a couple of songforms Vondramach never heard of that can be used to sing of multiple hits. Korga said he wanted to sit these shots out and simply observe me in my few seconds’ contact – which is perfectly understandable, though because I’ve already done it, I also know it is rather dull. If you look like anything at all during those few seconds, it’s just mildly drunk.

  Almost as soon as we turned from the natural blind of orange shales, two women cleared the ridge beside us, their braked bows glittering all about them under Iiriani. One was human, one evelm, both female; and both carried their bows with a surety that spoke an easy bowmanship greater than either Rat’s or mine. One flexed her wings between the fibre cords that bound her daykit to her nape. Her companion, who had frizzy brown hair and freckles beside her nose, hung back a few steps, watching.

  Momentarily I thought we would fall into that strained silence, resulting in meditation, that so frequently attends the encounter between strange hunters before song. Such silences may go on for half a day and baffle northern humans, who’d rather fall immediately into fighting than endure such protracted uncertainty. But above the ridge poked the broad and dust-darkened snout of the Old Hunter. ‘As I grow older,’ she said in her booming, burry voice, ‘more and more my task seems to be to introduce you one to another. Stand forward, Ollivet’t.’

  The woman with the daykit bound between her wings bent to let her bow stamp the gravel and came forward on claws whose steely black put her racial origins from about the same area in the south as our big algae farmer1 back at Dyethshome.

  ‘Ready yourself for song, Ollivet’t.’

  The woman glanced at the Old Hunter, lifted first her left claw, then her right, and recited: ‘Thank you for permeating these dry healthful airs with the taste of my name.’

  The Old Hunter, her own kit still bound with soiled human regs, her gumbone stained and pitted, her face scales dull and ragged came a few steps down the slope. ‘Stand forward, Marq Dyeth.’

  I set down my bow, stepped forward, then, in place lifted first my left foot, then my right. ‘Thank you for permeating these dry healthful airs with the taste of my name.’

  ‘Ready yourself for song, Marq Dyeth.’

  As the Old Hunter came down a few more steps, I looked at the woman across from me. Her facial scales, with only the light dust of a day’s outing, held none of the damages of a life addicted to cerebral radar transfers in the wild; her gear was strapped with the traditional cord, rather than the cultural intrusion of fabric; her sharp claws spoke of much time spent in the better-tended, frequently refloored runs; and her proportional age was not far above mine.

  We were all quiet for five, six, seven minutes. Knowing the difficulty humans can have with such pauses in communication, I wondered whether it was the synapse-jamming or simply life on Rhyonon that held Rat through the silence.

  Ollivet’t finally said: ‘I see, Old Hunter, you do not know my companion. Allow me then to usurp the tongue movements of the Introducer. Stand forth, Shalleme.’

  The human woman crouched expertly to shrug from her bow. Her finger and toenails were painted gold, which meant she had been born far to the north, or wanted to be mistaken for someone who had been – though in the south fewer and fewer humans paint their nails each year, which, as long as the custom continues other wheres, becomes a sign of origin in itself. She came forward quickly to stand by her companion, lifted one foot, then the other, so quickly and slightly one had to know the action to think it more than a flexing of her knees. She said, with a contralto richness that, in humans, still surprises me (though it shouldn’t): ‘Thank you for permeating these dry, healthful airs with the taste of my name.’

  The Old Hunter said: ‘Ready yourself for song, Shalleme.’ After another wait of about three minutes, the Old Hunter went on: ‘I know this last young hunter, but I have not been privileged with the recitation of her name. Now I must choose between my right of relinquishing my privilege as Introducer, or my right of conferring a name on anyone who survives in my memory under the sign of the tiny yellow dragon.’ The Old Hunter came down the rest of the slope, moved over to Korga, bent her head to flick one of her tongues at his smaller toes (remember those foot troughs in the run), then ambled over
to taste the dust on Ollivet’t’s midclaws, then stepped towards Shalleme’s gilded feet but did not actually touch them, then came to me and licked first one of my testicles, then my knee, then walked back to Korga.

  He watched her but (and I was thankful) did not say anything; and didn’t put down his bow. I began to let Thantish memories leave me.

  One tongue waved over one of Rat’s feet, then over the other; two others darted out and retreated. The Old Hunter looked up, narrowing her eyes at Iiriani’s glare. She took a few steps backward, up the slope, unfurling one wing, blackened on both sides with age, and folding it again, slowly. ‘I have chosen between my rights. I shall confer a name on you, youngest of hunters. I name you the Yellow Dragon’s Daughter.’

  Korga carefully and awkwardly shrugged off his bow: first from his neck brace, then from behind his chest supports. Two legs ground in gravel – it teetered … but he steadied it, so that it didn’t topple. For moments, he stayed crouched, looking at it as though the third leg might suddenly collapse.

  Carefully, he stood.

  Then he stepped forward.

  He glanced at me, lifted his right foot, next his left. (I winced: it was the wrong order, but no grave matter.) His eyes, burning, moved from mine to the Old Hunter’s, to Ollivet’t’s, to Shalleme’s. ‘Thank you … for permeating these dry, healthful airs with the sound of … no, the taste of my name.’

  As he glanced at me again, I grinned at him. His pitted face absorbed it.

  ‘Ready yourself for song, Yellow Dragon’s Daughter.’

  The Old Hunter, with her six-legged gait, moved a few more steps back up the slope, shrugged her own bow off on to the sand (a perfect three-point landing, despite the incline), raised her foreclaws, expanded her gills, opened her mouth, and sang.

  3.

  It was a simple, beautiful, traditional song – I’d heard it fifteen or twenty times on various hunts (‘I have come to carol my search for a quarry of the mind, only to encounter in the mind of another …’); I was both moved and disappointed. There are flamboyant songs, sung with seven or more tongues at once, full of buzzings, clickings, and poppings, highly rhythmic, where one tongue actually slaps and vibrates against the others – songs designed almost exclusively to impress and excite humans, true. But if a human is untutored to the ways of dragon hunting, dragon singing, it never fails to convince her that she has encountered something truly beautiful, alien, and strange. They are vulgar songs; most hunters consider them somewhat cheap. Yet, oddly enough, because evelmi invented them for us, they make an astonishingly good bridge by which a human mind can move on towards an appreciation of true evelm singing. Then there are a number of songs that are complete appropriations of human musical pieces – evelmi have, after all, many tongues to sing with and can create an impressive range of sound with each – which, if only for the respect it shows directly for a human art, opens up the way for a mutual appreciation to grow. But the song the Old Hunter chose was of neither type. Its barking roughness, its single-voiced drone, its limited tonal variety drifting about within a four-note range, required a thorough appreciation of the hunting song tradition, and in its most local form, in order to appreciate its rich beauties. And Rat possessed that appreciation no more than a Thant. But he listened, quietly if not attentively. By the end of it, the song’s loveliness had touched me again, even if Korga could not really share it: its rendering was, finally, impersonal, meticulous, exquisite – which are all high compliments in this tradition.

  When the song was finished, after the slow, final minutes of looser rhythmic improvisation on a single note, the two strangers smiled at the Old Hunter; so did I; Rat turned to me to see what he should do – a cloud passed from little Iiriani-prime, and, as he turned back, his eyes, which had the while gone human, blazed like mirrors. The human woman stared, blinked, frowned …

  Nobody spoke though – it would have been unbearably out of place.

  A minute later, Ollivet’t began to sing, and I thought I recognized the stress repetition pattern; almost immediately Shalleme began to sing with her, a partially improvised duet, of a sort that I’d heard had become popular in the far oest. (Oest of what? It simply reflects the northern orientation of the humans on Velm.) The idea is that the single-tongued human adds her voice to the multiple voices available to the evelm, to increase the complexity rather than to compete, with only an impoverished instrument. As Ollivet’t now brought two more, now three more of her tongues to the stressed and unstressed syllables, I marked the song of the dragon-flight’s multiplicity, richness, and beauty, and marked how my world’s culture had changed, under the impact of humanity, to make me, a human, part of it.

  Their song completed, I silently smiled my approval. There are detailed commentaries enough to occupy a lot of human lifetimes and a good number of evelm ones on how the nuances of the performance may reflect (or pervert) the experience they represent. A year spent travelling along any of our world’s university-chains, and you will have been exposed to more such commentary than anyone should be expected to bear. Suffice it that I was impressed.

  When I looked at Korga, he was standing with both hands joined before the groin of his pants, heavy human knuckles masking the jewels that extended his perception, his concentration, his comprehension. He was the only one of the five of us, I noticed, who wore clothing. Was it a sign of his alienness? Stripping myself of thought, I bent my head a moment, then began my song.

  I don’t know how well it went over. There is a tradition among the Dyeths, which dates back at least to Vrach Dyeth, Gilda’s first adopted child, that humans should learn to sing as well as we can by our own standards in order to render our music. I took endless singing lessons – went around breathing all over everything – as a child, from human and evelm teachers, as have many, if not quite most, humans in the south. I have a pleasing voice, and a fair comprehension of the hunting song’s fine points. I sang an old single-voiced form I thought would be appropriate: ‘Here when I hunt with a friend, phantasms of flight …’ It alternates highly formal sections, on which I rather outdid myself, with improvisatory sections, that now seemed just lame – there was no way I could sing of what was unique for me about this hunt, at least not through any spontaneous outpour.

  I finished. And the Old Hunter, as well as the pair of strange hunters, was smiling – the strangers more because of what my approach to song meant about me, and therefore about what one was likely to find in the world around here. After all, they were from a good ways away. I don’t know what, if anything, they thought of it as song. But that, as Santine once said to me, is what you can never know and I can never tell you.

  Only a little too quickly, Rat took a step forward. His eyes were closed. (I’d never heard anyone sing a hunting song with eyes closed.) When he opened his mouth, just a little at first, as if to taste the air, I was suddenly overcome with a cascade of anxieties. Did he even know what a song was? Only hours ago, he had completely misjudged hunting! In that inter-cultural presumption which may obliterate the intelligence of even the most experienced diplomat1, had I simply presumed my total surround was his surround in a way which the first sound from him would make all too clear?