Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Samuel R. Delany

  I went over and dropped on the soft seat, while she went to rummage in the white cabinets that stood about the room. ‘So, you folk out in the prestigious rim of the city have decided to pay a visit to the centre. Ah, riches! Ah, poverty!’

  ‘Oh, come now,’ I said. ‘Someone of your profession1 has been many times richer than I five times over.’ Santine was a tracer1, and the exchange was one of the rituals that had grown up here in the south to integrate the human concern for wealth with a culture that had no concept for uneven-distribution-of-exchange-power (so that it took its neuroses out in much more interesting – to humans – ways). ‘I’ve been meaning to pay you a visit ever since I got back. And now I have!’

  Santine found one stone on one shelf, licked it, then found another – tried that one. ‘How’re the rest of the worlds in the universe rolling along?’

  ‘Oh, well enough, I suppose – though a month or so back I was on a world called Nepiy …’ But Nepiy took me to another world that no longer existed and that I didn’t want to talk about. ‘Well, they had their problems! But then, why talk about unpleasantnesses here. Popping around the universe the way I do, the only thing that still surprises me is that there’re so many humans in it.’

  ‘Billions,’ Santine said, picking up a third stone. ‘Over how many worlds? Thousands of worlds, you told me once.’

  I leaned my elbows back on the cushions. ‘The truth is, Santine, I don’t have any real concept of how a billion differs from a million. Or a thousand. At least in real terms. No human does.’

  ‘I’ve heard – ’ Santine turned, on her hind legs now, flavour stones on all foreclaws – ‘that, other than by abstraction, none of you can really count above three.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘But just for an example, I’ve walked into the Dyethshome amphitheatre when it was three-quarters full and then again when it was four-fifths full and had no immediate sense of the difference.’ The amphitheatre at Dyethshome has ninety-nine tiers of seats rising about the central skene. I looked about the eleven tiers of stone that rose around Santine’s room, on the bottom of which I was sitting now. ‘Crowds … large numbers …’ I shrugged. ‘They’re mostly things one finds today doing metaphorical work in bad poems.’

  ‘I suppose it’s because I’m one of those,’ she said with one tongue; and with another, ‘women that humans fascinate, in all the ambiguity the phrase allows in our language(s) – ’ She added the plural with still another tongue evelmi usually only used for tasting, then picked up the sentence with still another (whose relation to the first I could no longer figure I’d blinked) – ‘and it still, after all the intercourse between our cultural discourses, does,’ and, with another tongue, ‘doesn’t it’, and concluded with the traditional tongue for endings: ‘Yes?’ Then she laughed. ‘As a foreigner to this city, I know there is a grammatical mistake in there somewhere. Here, my young friend: taste.’ With the deep, disturbing rumble that was evelm laughter, she came to me.

  I kneeled up to lick first one stone (peppery, with an aftertaste of mint), and another (the cool inertness of most rocks), and another (the ashy saltiness not of sodium chloride but of some potassium substitute). Santine gave me the fourth to hold and taste at my leisure, and I leaned back on the cushions, much more relaxed now that I had experienced some kind of familiar greeting. ‘Santine, you know what I heard not so long ago? In the play of the universal machinery, another world has met its destruction.’ So much for what one doesn’t want to talk about. ‘A whole human population – ’ somehow I just assumed it was an all-human population – ‘was annihilated.’

  ‘Yes, you humans do that to your worlds from time to time, don’t you?’ Santine mused. ‘Were there any survivors?’ She moved off again to her shelves.

  ‘There had to be some,’ I said. ‘One. Or a hundred. Or a thousand.’ I adjusted myself on the cushion. ‘Isn’t that an awful thing to have to think about while you’re … gallivanting about the stars, as you put it?’

  ‘It’s not a terribly pleasant thing to think about while you’re bound to the surface of a single planet,’ she said. ‘Sometimes you do it to other people’s worlds too.’

  ‘Mmm …’

  ‘How happy I am that the processes of thought are so different between my race and yours. We love you.’

  ‘We love you, too,’ I acknowledged. Another ritual – indeed, I’d never questioned what it meant. But it always made me feel good. ‘How long has it been since I’ve seen you now?’

  ‘Not long. To me. Years. Standard.’ Santine, instead of sitting, was pawing about in another set of shelves. ‘And not many of those. And in that time, I have been looking over the book you lent me.’

  I frowned. ‘Book …?’

  ‘I suppose I shall some day become accustomed to,’ she declared with one tongue; and with another, ‘the religions of you humans: they fascinate me. Only,’ and a third took up, as she turned from the shelf with a familiar object in her midclaws, ‘the book you lent me has little to do with religion. It seems, from all I can find out either from it or from General Info, to deal exclusively with art and life. Which, as I first said to you when you were a two-year-old, doing knee paintings on rough fabrics about your mothers’ claws: I do not understand your race’s concept of art. Nor am I that secure about my own race’s notions on that intriguing topic.’

  ‘Vondramach Okk,’ I said, because I recognized the leather, glass, and aluminium volume in Santine’s claws. ‘I remember loaning it to you. You said you were interested in Vondramach’s religious thought; so I lent you her poems. I just suspected you might find something in them to illuminate her theological notions. I’ve always felt the poems provided an interesting commentary on her religious period.’

  ‘Nothing.’ Santine clicked her bluish claws on the bluer clay. Where she came from, that was an ironic sign for negation, though evelmi in the very far north make the same gesture for intense agreement – while those who grow up near Morgre don’t make it at all. ‘They suggest a virulent critique of everything religious, yes.’

  I laughed. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘for humans, the declaration “God is dead” is just as religious a comment as “I believe in God”; and the infant, innocent of all theology, seems as holy as the studied saint. Do we humans have a broader notion of religiosity than you?’

  ‘Merely less refined.’ Santine arched her upper gum ridge, which was a smile. ‘Vondramach intrigues me because she had tasted the bitterest sins. Such flavours authorize the highest, the deepest, the widest religious feelings that pull us away from all social centres. But these poems, as you call them, are things made with the taloned claw rather than the perceiving tongue.’

  ‘I think,’ and laughed while I both thought and said it and so probably distorted both processes, ‘that because you evelmi have more tongues than fingers – or taloned claws – you will never understand us humans, really.’

  ‘And that is why you humans kill us in the north,’ Santine declared. ‘Ah, yours is a political statement if I ever heard one. Well, your Vondramach was a mistress of politics as well as art and religion, yes? But in those two fields, she leaves me far behind.’

  I didn’t say (indeed, I probably didn’t think): That’s why we’re killing you in the north. Rather I found myself simply uncomfortable with this, from one of my oldest friends. I was about to question this discomfort as diplomatically as I could when Santine lunged forward.

  ‘Here is your book.’

  I pushed myself up on one elbow, took it, and reached for the chain hanging from my waist. ‘Thank you.’ There was a ring on one side of the volume, which I snapped to the ornate clip at the chain’s end –

  – and thought of a row of small yellow lights in the distance.

  ‘Oh,’ Santine said; she had obviously thought the same thing. ‘I think you have a photocall.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. I stood up from the cushions and looked about for a stone wall. Near the wall, connections are a
lways better. I walked towards the mound of schist beside the lowest tier of seats, and thought through my reception code:

  ‘Oh, Marq!’ My mother, V’vish, clasped her foreclaws and declared with two tongues at once:

  ‘Where have you been, Marq?’

  ‘Where are you, dear! Please, the Thants are here and we don’t want to insult them!’

  I took a deep breath. Is it formal?’

  ‘Oh, no. Just come home, please. We don’t ask much of you, but we love you.’ And with another tongue: ‘And we’d love for Santine to come, if she would.’

  ‘I’ll ask her,’ I said – then tried to change my voice a little, which is a habit we single-tongued humans here get into in childhood, but which, except when talking to my parents, I’ve mercifully (almost) broken. ‘And I’m on my way.’

  I turned from the wall as V’vish vanished.

  ‘They want you, don’t they,’ Santine said. ‘Do they want me too?’

  ‘They do. Will you come? It’s an informal party for some offworld friends. The Thants …? But I know you’ve met them.’

  ‘If it’s an informal affair, I’ll be along in an informal amount of time. Tell your parents, won’t you, to expect me?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Good.’ And with her broad, beautiful wings unfurled and boisterously beating, she shooed me towards the entrance plate. ‘Get on with you then,’ she cried; and with other tongues: ‘Get out … ! Get out … !’ and with still another: ‘You’ll see me later in the evening. I look forward to seeing you at your home!’

  ‘Yes, Santine,’ I said, as the night breeze and the air from her contracting wings, in the midst of the rising fall, joined the roar of dark Dylleaf’s cleaning winds.

  4.

  Up a level, across the park, down one run and along the rollerway – which once had seats but now only has the worn pentagonal spots where the cleats had been removed.

  Thoughts while rolling through my hometown:

  On Morgre’s lowest level there are, today, twelve- and twenty-rack vegetable farms, with huge metaquartz light-conduits leading down from the overground parks. There are distilleries for the liquor we make in a number of Velm’s southeast geosectors from the wild sarb-grasses. There are swimming pools, design mills, a dozen fine cheese houses, which still make their various wheels and stars of green-, yellow- and orange-rinded cheese from the fine nematode milk the out-city farm produces. There are ceramic works and aquaria, and what has slowly gained a reputation as the finest manufactory of personal electronic musical instruments in the hemisphere. (The biannual music festival held at Morgre, in which composers come from all over our world to have their works performed, was one of the joys of my adolescence.) On ground level and the first sub-ground level, three-quarters of the population still lives. Wide alleys twist between and up and down the roller-ramps and stairs about them. Those who live above ground mostly have skylights in at least one of their living rooms. (Those below, I’ve always noticed, have so much more varied holoramas outside their window-walls or in their surround rooms.) Rolling walks take people beneath the girders supporting the parks above, past the various outlets of the various service unions. Broadlifts are always going up and down, their rails sliding closed, and the young and old women of both races are always disappearing up into, or appearing down from, the upper, vine-hung parks.

  It’s more or less inevitable: those who work2 in the out-city communes and co-ops ringing an urban complex always feel themselves slightly superior to those who work2 within the complex itself, especially when the out-city co-ops are so old and well established as the furniture factory, Dyethshome, or the Farm … Yet there are so many advantages to life within the city – more parks, more runs, more pools, more dancing areas, more, and more varied kinds of, sex, greater varieties of social and cultural stimulation, more adventure, and more play – that the twin pulls, of prestige in one direction and excitement in the other, keep the general population moving both ways. In an efficient bureaucratic anarchy – our most common form of government on Velm – there are very few jobs2 that one keeps for more than five years. (Your job1 is another story.) And since your job2 is pretty much the one that determines where you live, a good third of the population is constantly moving out to live in the outskirting co-ops when the outer-city jobs2 open up; or, by the same cycle, are moving in to sample centre-city life. And it tends to be a different third all the time. Still, I was no more than thirteen and a year back from Senthy when I first realized that somehow those in my home, Dyethshome, were exempt from this cyclic flow – though I’m sure the council-board who, seven generations before, had authorized Mother Dyeth to accept the gift that Vondramach had offered her, saw it as nothing more than a large out-city commune, even if the idea of a commune that was nothing but a work of art struck them as unusual – and might even have aroused downright hostile suspicions in that board’s ancestors on their other worlds.

  Myself, though I’ve lived in Morgre and other urban complexes on Velm (and off) many times, indeed loved life in the inner city with the passion of a youngster loosed from the toils of tertiary homework3, I was always on a labour2-sabbatical when I lived inside, never on a job2. My friends there tended to be others with as much free time as I, though they might have been in all or any other jobs2, inner or outer, only weeks before. All my jobs2 have ended up in the out-city communes, where frankly I feel more at home when I’m working at anything other than my profession1: diplomacy.

  I’m not the only Dyeth to whom this applies.

  Because of this, from time to time, close friends – like Santine – have remarked I have a different manner about me, something other than just my being human. They more or less find it amusing. When I was younger, I would look within myself when women said this, to seek out the pains of being different and to wonder how I’d been wounded by my isolation in the outer-circle’s older labour co-ops. Yet offworld folk like the Thants take the same manner – which for us Dyeths marks a hurt, a failure, a deprivation – and read it rather as a mark of privilege. Which in turn makes us find them somewhat amusing.

  Among its three free-standing, two-hundred-metre multichrome walls, their transparent panes gone dazzling at Iirianiset, on the eastern rim of Morgre just beyond the blue tiles of Water Alley, by Whitefalls, rise the courts of Dyethshome.

  5.

  I rushed up the steps across green flags, wondering where the Thants had been on their way to that had allowed them to stop off at southern Velm for a visit. You understand their world is very different from ours. (Their sun system: Quorja. Their moonless world, sixth out: Zetzor. Their city, called 17, is blasted among myriads into the rock wall of a three-kilometre-deep canyon that worms and branches and doubles back and rebranches for several thousand k’s about Zetzor’s permanently dark north pole. Yes, Quorja is about sixty-eight thousand light-years around the galactic rim from Iiriani.) I’ve said that interstellar travel is expensive? To promote cultural interchange, some of Zetzor’s larger geosectors finance one of their reproductive communes to unlimited fare for travel anywhere about the galaxy. (Myself, and every other ID, has to get a job1 where fare expenses are taken up by the employer1 requesting the import.) Once, I made the mistake of asking Thadeus Thant how she and her spouses and her offspring had been chosen for such an honour. Somewhere behind careening metal, she laughed. ‘Well, considering that we’re chosen from the population of an entire world, you can be sure the selection isn’t entirely fair …’ I raised an eyebrow and (diplomatically?) changed the subject. At some point in their random travels they’d met my mother Egri (also an ID) just before she retired about ten years ago. Striking up a friendship, they’ve been dropping in to see us once or twice a year standard ever since. A visit from the Thants at Dyethshome – Death’s Home is how it’s still pronounced, though vowels have shifted and, in the last hundred years or so, space and punctuation have fallen out – is ebullient goodwill, lavish and humorous gifts (that the Thants buy or h
ave made, by the bye, after they get here. The importation of offworld gifts? Even their lavish geosector government can’t afford to go that far.) It’s Thantish awkwardness, if not downright insincerity, growing from their reception and friendship with a stream so old and so august, at least the way it tastes to their tongues, as Dyeth.

  ‘That – ’ Alsrod Thant put her small brown hands behind her, gazing up at the crystal column – ‘is your grandmother, your seven-times great-grandmother, the source of your stream, Gylda Dyeth?’

  I chuckled. ‘It’s what they used to call a simulated synapse casting. All the soft lights and multicoloured flashes inside supposedly reproduce her personality, in crystalline form.’

  The glimmering pillar rose from its ornate metal pedestal to soar beside the wall decorations next to the blades of the door, till it disappeared into the equally ornate capital, one with the court’s roof, where silver tracery pictured what one evelm artist had thought she’d seen in our stars.

  ‘Shall I tell you the story connected with it?’

  Alsrod’s hands came before her to clasp in mimed ecstasy beneath her brown chin.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. ‘Mother Dyeth lived well into the fourth generation of her children. The casting was taken right at the old lady’s demise. A decent length of time after her bodily passing, when it was turned on, so we’ve all been told, the capital speaker up there announced: “Now, I’m a mechanical reproduction. Not the real thing at all. I know it. You know it. You were fools to get this thing made in the first place. Frankly, I’d turn it off if I were you and let me stay dead,” which was so uncannily like Mother Dyeth in life, everyone was quite astounded at the synapse caster’s skill.’

  ‘Did they obey?’

  I nodded. ‘I don’t think there’s anyone among us who knows how to turn it on today – though when I was a child, sometimes we would stand around, my sisters and I, and all try to put our arms around it, not quite able to touch.’