Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Samuel R. Delany

  Sometime in the past minute, the light had dropped below the refraction threshold of his artificial eyes. The balls were glass-filled caves in which small machines sparkled. Korga smiled briefly around them, then looked up at a star in the forking offshoots of a fire cactus. The cactus arms, knobby and black above us, hugged a star in its blue patch. He raised his ringed hand to nick his middle fingernail three or four times on his bottom teeth. ‘It was a law – a law that, today, I understand. Thanks to the Web. But all I understood when I was a youngster, living off the refuse of a city whose name I still cannot say properly even in my own language, was that I wanted, and was not allowed, to hold a little, hairy male to me whose head I could look down at, to bend my face down to his when he looked up, to rub my mouth and eyes in his hair when he looked down.’ He looked at me, no smile now; and there are worlds which have tales of demons with hollow eyes. ‘I had chances to do it, or do things close enough to it.’ He looked away. ‘But I have learned more about why my world was the way it was in the time since it has been gone than I ever knew while I lived on it.’

  ‘Rat, were you persecuted for your sexual predi – … well, I mean – ’ (The first I was ever aware one could be was on Senthy with Egri and Genya; there all sadomasochism was hunted out and punished with barbaric single-mindedness; especially consensual, which their authorities considered the ultimate disease. It was Genya who, as we left that moon in disgust, first pointed out to ten-year-old me how, even as it was suppressed, sadomasochism there was encouraged by every private park and public building around the polar ocean we lived on: all were designed to suggest some weapon or mangle in common use by the local fisherwomen; all were invariably labelled with some written plaque of prohibitions.) ‘I mean, were you ever legally – ’

  ‘Five or six times I was caught and reprimanded, or put in a detention house.’

  Will sex between humans ever lose its endlessly repeated history? ‘Did it stop you from having sex?’

  ‘For a week – perhaps even for a few months, the first time.’ He moved a little, his whole body. ‘Finally, I had no sex at all.’

  During my first three years as an ID, I thought my job1 was not to be surprised at the universe’s human variety. Later I realized that it was not to be surprised that nonstop surprises would henceforth be my life.

  ‘If you had asked me, on my world,’ Korga said, ‘whether my five or six run-ins with our laws over sexual infractions had anything to do with my choosing to give sex up for what I thought would be the rest of my life, I would have said no. I had had too many other run-ins for too many other reasons so that the sexual ones seemed the least of it. If you asked me here, however, lying with you like this, I could not say for sure.’ His rough hand, with its heavy jewels, moved an inch over his belly, then rested. ‘One burden of all of this new knowledge is that old certainties crumble beneath it. But this – ’ he watched me with eyes it was hard to believe could see – ‘is the first time I have lain down to make love with another person since I was … nineteen standard years old.’

  I swung my feet off the mat and down to the rug and looked back to where this male who was at least forty standard years of age had not moved. ‘Oh, come on.’ No, he had not become anyone else, and yet – ‘I can’t believe that anyone who is my …’ Calling someone your perfect erotic object to his face seemed suddenly to express the perfection it stood for much too imperfectly. I took a breath. ‘How many times … eh, standing up since then?’

  He shrugged. ‘Three … four. Once with a woman who stole me from my work station. Once before that and once after, with some others …’

  ‘What about before … before you were nineteen?’

  ‘A few hundred times – as compared to the few thousand you said.’

  ‘Oh.’ Our geosector has no particular prohibition about virginity; but I had just gotten a little insight into those worlds that have – the ones that forbid it totally. ‘It’s still hard for me to believe.’

  ‘They told me,’ he said, ‘you had probably been to bed with several thousand males. They told me you went to bed with males the way I did when I was … before my anxiety was terminated. Only for you it was not illegal. They also told me that if I’d lived a more ordinary life on Rhyonon, though I might have gone to bed with a comparable number of men – thousands, rather than the hundred or so I did – I would probably feel very different about your going to bed with them than I do.’ Once more the empty eyes came back to me. ‘Don’t you ever persecute people here for their sex?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘I mean, I told you, a long time ago, in the north – ’

  ‘The language,’ he said. ‘That’s what I mean.’

  I frowned.

  ‘I lived on a much younger world, on which – they told me in the Web – we spoke a much older language. We had “men” and “women”, “bitches” and “dogs”. The men were all male and were called “he” and the women were female and called “she” – ’

  ‘I know the word “man”,’ I said. ‘It’s an archaic term. Sometimes you’ll read over it in some old piece or other.’

  ‘To take those distinctions away is a kind of …’ He mused a moment – ‘… persecution.’

  ‘Perhaps to someone who’s used to them …’ I said. ‘We just have different – ’

  But he chuckled, briefly and for no more than three syllables. ‘On my world “he” was what everyone, male or female, wanted to be … perhaps the males thought they were a little closer to it. On your world and, I have been told, on the vast majority of others, “he” is what everyone, male and female, wants to have. Perhaps all of us are equally far away from that.’

  ‘You don’t like that I’ve gone to bed with as many people as I have – or the way we talk about it?’

  ‘I don’t think about it.’

  ‘Mmm.’ I pondered. ‘You know, if you’d lived a more ordinary life on Rhyonon, you wouldn’t be here. How do you feel about … me?’

  He didn’t smile. How long did it take me to understand he really did find things funny, but that humour for him – or for his world, I still don’t know which – was simply the most private of emotions? He said: ‘They told me, and told me again, and told me yet again: I must remember that I am not on my world, I am on yours.’ The bedding whispered, shifted; he sat up beside me, where I was sitting, at the edge. His naked knees were above mine and wide apart. His eyelids smiled above me. ‘They also told me that when I don’t know what to do, I should do what the person nearest me does – while I decide the questions I need to ask.’ He was quiet a moment; then he let out a long breath. ‘I never knew there was this much to know.’

  I started to ask what he meant. But he laid his ringed hand on my knee.

  We looked at it.

  The flesh was thick and dry. Through my thigh hair about them, I could feel wide palm and broad fingers, unsure of their own weight, now adding a little to it, now taking a little away. I thought: it feels more like warm stone than the bone-and-meat-filled hide it is. I reached out two fingers. My own hands have always struck me as very ordinary: the fairly small, somewhat fleshy hands of a fairly small, somewhat hairy fellow who only uses them for manual labour one job2 out of three; and, wonderful as I’ve always found nail-biting in others, I’ve never been able to sustain the habit myself, so gave up trying long ago. I put my middle fingertip on wide copper set around both edges with green stone chips, some opaque, some glassy, the metal between geometrically embossed. The ring one further forward bunched his broad knuckle skin before it, wrinkled as a big knot or a small brain. Spreading my fingers wide, I touched my forefingertip to his forenail – side to side twice the width of my thumb. It emerged from beneath the cuticle bank, thickened against as much gnawing as the horn, went on the distance of the paler moon and that distance again, before the support structure broke down (I cannot say ‘was undermined’ because all that could be had been, and then been bitten away); for this distance again, it clutched at the quick,
its edges pitted so smally and myriadly it presented the regularity of the endlessly attacked border, marked by the dirt of an unknown task3. The crown rose and curved away, twice the length of the nail itself, as it did on all his fingers, thrice, on thumb and little. As my fingertips moved on its upper surface, the heavy crown seemed of equal hardness – and clearly of greater endurance – as the horn. That surface bore the swirls and lines – fainter of course, and interrupted, and scarred – that, below, would let his finger print. I moved my hand, feeling the textures, copper, stone, nail, skin; and thought about the mechanics through which we locate beauty. By art, we can only do it through a disinterested precision which represses, while it mimes, all the interest that impels it. And we can only hope the difference between the repressed and the represented will read as intensity.

  His hand was beautiful.

  Korga said: ‘You see now: what my fingers hold is not only what my life has become since my world’s death. You may find in their scars, if you look, all the poverty of the time before.’

  ‘Does that hurt?’ I asked. ‘Does it worry you?’

  ‘It hurts.’ He lifted his hand from under mine, put his arm around my shoulder; again I felt warm metal, cool flesh. ‘But one thing about what was done to me on my world: there are many worries – many kinds of worries – I do not have.’

  ‘The synapse-jamming?’

  ‘Do you wonder what I would be like without it? It’s not supposed to change who you are …’

  ‘I hadn’t,’ I said. ‘Yet.’ What I did wonder was what worries a tyrant, priest, and poet, dead two hundred years, had carried with her after such an operation.

  For a while, I felt one finger move on my shoulder, then another.

  He said: ‘Your family – they are very angry.’

  I looked up at him, wondering what he could mean. ‘I know very little of families,’ I said.

  ‘I had none,’ he said, ‘though I used to think of them a lot … when I was younger.’

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ I said. ‘What family?’

  He looked down, with the slight brief smile of puzzlement that was so like his slight brief smile of pleasure. ‘When I came in from the theatre, your sibling – the one with the metallic yellow flesh – was angry at your black sister; finally she took her outside while the rest of you watched.’

  ‘George – my …?’ I looked up. ‘Nea …?’ I stood and I went to the chair on which his wrinkled pants were piled, here and there in the folds showing metal belt-links. ‘They’re not even from our world. George and Nea are Thants. They’re friends of Dyeth.’ But when it dawned on me, I laughed out loud. ‘You thought we were a family …?’ Then I smiled. ‘Suddenly some of the things you’ve been saying begin to make sense. No, the Dyeths are very much our own nurture stream – at least that’s the translation of the northern evelmi’s term for it. This particular nurture stream has been bubbling along for seven ripples now. There’re only two older streams in the area – one at the tracer collective and one at the nematode farm. And I wouldn’t be all that upset if ours went on for seventeen or twenty-seven more.’ There are so many small movements of response you expect from people when they listen to you – there the head nods slightly, here it raises a little, now the eyelids narrow. He, who, against me, forehead to foot, had responded so that, minutes ago, he had seemed an extension of myself, only sat, only watched. Though I was sure he listened as intently as anyone else could possibly listen (as intently as I knew I listened to him), still, before his still face, to believe it was all faith. ‘I was adopted by the Dyeths when I was a baby – from some infant exchange in the north; but most of my sisters come from even farther south. Small Maxa was semisomed from some neuroplasm that an evelm grandmother of mine, N’yom, donated to a bioengineering experiment many many years ago and that was just taken out of suspension about a decade and a half back – though of course most of Maxa’s chromosome sequence was taken from humans. But in the genetic sense she’s part evelm. Still, there is no egg-and-sperm relation between any of our parents and any of this generation of children, nor between any of my sisters – human or evelm – and each other.’ But certainly the Web had told him this. Somewhere away from where words gather before speaking, I vaguely saw us taking a walk outside around the platform while we talked. And because such images are closer to movement than words, I moved, planning to speak. But he stood, with me, before words came. And walked with me as I started to walk. (Thus faith is rewarded.) ‘Rhyonon was a Family world, wasn’t it?’ As we passed my workdesk, for a moment the lamp above it gave his eyes back their whites and greens. And the demon vanished into his pitted face. ‘At least someone told me that it was about to fall over in that direction.’

  ‘The Sygn,’ he said. ‘They told me in the Web that that’s the side you and your stream … your world is on.’

  I said: ‘It’s also supposed to be the side that Japril and most of the Web are on … unless there’s been some new information that I’m not privy to.’ At the rail, I lifted up the ornate triple hook from its hasp and swung out the lacquered gate.

  Korga nodded as we started down the wide plank steps. ‘My world was just about to join with the Family officially – when it was destroyed.’ Korga’s toes and the balls of his feet were so big they hung over the edge of each step as he stepped down. His sole’s thick rims were rough and cracked, like a woman’s gone barefoot twenty years on sand. ‘And I did not even know there was a clash between them or, really, the name of either side.’ As we walked down, he kept very close to me. And the way people much taller than you sometimes do, he rested one hand on my shoulder.

  That almost made me want to cry.

  ‘Tell me about the Dyeths,’ he said, as we turned on the clearing to walk beside the raised platform.

  ‘Gylda Dyeth …’ I said – recited really, as I would have in any orientation sessions2 had some student asked me the same question; frequently when I want to cry, I recite. ‘Gylda Dyeth migrated here to Velm, when she was nineteen, in a small shuttle of eight thousand colonists from a world called Klaven, which had recently become fearful of Cultural Fugue. It’s a problem certain metal-ceramic-plastic-intensive worlds, with an economic variation displacement of more than point-seven-six, are prone to fall into …’ I halted, thinking of Rhyonon.

  There’s a ten-day period right after hotwind season when I wouldn’t let anyone – no matter how rough her feet – walk barefoot on fallen fire-cactus needles. Then the needles are bright red (and the cactus trunks smoke grey). But at this time of year they heap about in brown piles over the scrumbly soil (and the trunks are deep maroon). Those under our feet were almost as soft as the powder-soil discarded by the nemotode strainers, or (more accurately) the sloughed scales over the floor of a seven-generation dragon cave.

  His hand still on my shoulder, we turned to take the circuit of blunt prickles. ‘I’ve always imagined Gylda, when she got here, looking somewhat like Nea Thant does now – a tall, intense, black woman with somewhat yellowish eyes. She spent six years on Velm, first in the north at the other end of the world, and then here in the south. It was on a religious visit to our little moon, Arvin, where she met the woman who once wore your rings.’

  ‘Vondramach Okk …’ He said the name with the uncertainty of a native evelm passing some polysyllabled human word from tongue to tongue, inserting all sorts of apostrophes. ‘Japril, Ynn, and Marta told me of Vondramach Okk.’

  ‘They hit it off pretty well. Gylda spent the next five years standard in Vondramach’s service, doing jobs for her offworld that I like to imagine were somewhat similar to what I do today. Only my better judgement tells me that, given grandma’s youthful accomplishments and Okk’s mature needs, they were probably quite a bit nastier. Those five years took her all over the galaxy – sometimes with Vondramach, sometimes without. But as she had left Klaven, she finally left Vondramach’s service and came back here to Velm. They parted on good terms. When she returned to this world, here to
Morgre, Vondramach gave her – or had built for her – well, here it looks like we’re outside it – ’

  ‘Dyethshome?’

  I nodded.

  We walked between tall cactus trunks. Brown needles brushed our shoulders. Thick shadows from the platform’s central lamp barred the ground. Ahead, rocks broke away beneath netmoss. Arvin, the little moon that looks like a star, was up. Beneath it, the stream broiled through its crevice, searching for Whitefalls. ‘But there’s nothing much more I can really say about it, other than that it’s a stream where you are as welcome as I am, because each ripple, each wave and rill is held to the other by love. And I … well, guess I love you.’ I sighed.

  We stepped wide of a small stone crevice on to netmoss. Last year’s deader, darker tangle cushioned the coppery web of this year’s. On the far rocks, banks of elephant lichen (trace of the Web’s planoforming, common to so many worlds) raised their crinkly barks in the night-light.

  Suddenly Korga’s hand dropped from my shoulder. ‘That …’ he said. ‘That’s running water …?’

  ‘Yes. It joins with Whitefalls further along.’

  ‘It’s the first I’ve ever seen.’ He squatted, staring.

  I looked down at his back’s curve, measured over vertebrae and ribs and planed one side with star- and Arvinlight, ghostly through cactus branches. He held his hand over waters ribbed with their own quivering rush. Momentarily stones and metal seemed suspensors holding those heavy fingers up.

  He lowered them.

  Water bubbled at his palm’s edge, still between his knuckles. (His big toe broke the earth he squatted on.) He submerged his hand.

  I asked: ‘Does the cold water do anything to the rings’ functioning?’

  He looked up. ‘Perhaps it gives me a kind of … But it’s only the chill that would happen to anyone putting a hand in cold water.’ He stayed there almost a whole minute. ‘No.’

  When he stood, I said: ‘This way.’

  His hand wet and warm on my shoulder, we came on around the platform’s fifth corner. As we started towards the stairs, I asked: ‘Rat, what do you feel about all this?’ and wondered what his notion of ‘all this’ was.