Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  I’ve said the Web discourages interstellar travel; it also frowns on excess interstellar imports, which means such importers’ minions, Industrial Diplomats, are considered a necessary evil; and there are days (if a job1 is stymied the way my last one was) when I think of the Web in much the same terms. But probably for that reason I hadn’t mentioned my profession1 at the conference so far. ‘And what do you do1?’ was all I could come back with, while I wondered in which folders and fiches he had gone prying to find out.

  ‘I’m a free-agented professional1,’ Clym said with a businesslike smile. Sporting spiky leaves, the stem of the crenna went under his jaw, down his neck, and disappeared beneath the black collar. ‘What the good women of this universe would call a psychotic killer.’

  ‘How fascinating.’ Well, he was not the first I’d met: and I assume that while I’m in the profession1 I am, he won’t be the last. I wondered if his friend knew. ‘When’s the last time you killed somebody?’

  ‘Really want to know?’ Clym scratched his ear with thick fingers. In orange, black, and gold, a multifanged beast’s head ornamented the ham of his thumb. The creature’s neck wrapped his wrist to disappear under his cuff. ‘You remember, during the morning session, when I slipped out of my booth for a few minutes, presumably to go to the john …?’

  I nodded ‘yes’ with no memory of it at all.

  Clym nodded back with deep and knowing seriousness.

  ‘Oh …!’ When caught in the pleats, snags, and politics texturing the surface of a world, the Family/Sygn feud can get intense. I’ve said my seven-times great-grandmother possibly shared my profession1. In soberer moments I assume what she did for Okk was closer to Clym’s calling. ‘At least you folks only do in one or so people at a time.’ Part of a diplomat’s job, even an industrial one, is to be able to say something nice about everybody. ‘Not so long ago – oh, very far from here – someone was telling me about a whole world they thought had just gotten done in. Of course, being in my profession1, I didn’t really believe –’

  ‘You mean Rhyonon.’ Gold nap hazed Clym’s roundish skull. His hand went up to scratch it. ‘In the Tyon-Omega system. The seventh world out. Rhyonon.’

  ‘Was that its name?’ A moment of Nepiy’s loud desolation was superimposed over the quiet waste before me, bright as some GI prompt, while the possibility of belief organized itself uncomfortably. ‘The women who mentioned it to me didn’t say. They were too concerned about the possibilities of Cultural Fugue on their own world. I wonder if this Rhyonon had gone with the Family or the Sygn?’

  Clym looked at me strangely. ‘Then you don’t know anything about it …?’

  ‘No. I don’t, really.’ I’m sure I looked pretty strangely back.

  ‘A world is a big place,’ Clym said, sounding like a GI prompt himself. ‘I was on my way to do a little job there, right when Rhyonon bought it. For the next month of my life it was all I heard about, talked about, or thought about. It’s a little odd, not a month after that, to meet someone who doesn’t even know for sure if it happened.’

  ‘You mean it did happen …’ I got chills, while on Clym’s blondly hairy foot, a mechanical beetle with copper pincers crawled amidst tattooed green and yellow crenna roothairs, to disappear under his pants cuff. ‘You were there? When was it? What happened?’

  ‘What can I tell you about Rhyonon?’ Clym shrugged; and I thought, as I always do when someone begins that way about a world: What can you say that’s not contradicted or obliterated by any given continental plate, geosector, county, horizon-to-horizon bit of beauty, monotony, or horror? ‘It was a sandy world –’ (Like most –) ‘with a double-rotation axis, giving it an irregular day/season alteration –’ (Rare; but after six months the inhabitants don’t even notice –) ‘as well as a hot, fairly consistent temperature over the whole of it. A few canyon systems gouged about in it. Most of the population was concentrated at the equator. Lots of geological activity in the north – mainly earthquakes – that were kept down by a number of strategically placed hydraulic stations. Nothing but sand in the south. Two moons, too small to see from the surface. And a dust layer, rather than a cloud system, that reddened the day and blotted the stars at night over most of it. No indigenous life, though in the north there were the usual signs that possibly there’d once been biogenic activity. But nothing so conclusive as a fossil. There was the usual genetically tailored, imported lichens – mostly grown in the cities. And the deserts were rife with the usual atmosphere-generating bacteria that had been brought in to keep the sulphur and ammonia down and the oxygen up. A conservative, moderately populated world, it wasn’t on any important data lanes. It didn’t have much to offer in the line of information for anyone else, and it responded by claiming not to want to know anything about anyone else. They wouldn’t even allow a GI system on surface; only a paltry one they let the Web establish on the larger moon –’

  ‘I’m just curious,’ I said. ‘Had they aligned themselves with Family or Sygn?’ I guess one just likes to know these things.

  ‘They were still in Interplay.’ (That’s the official name, in case you’re wondering, for the state in which a world is making up its mind.) ‘When the first troubles were beginning to get out of hand, some conservative political party, called the Crazy Greys, which had just won a landslide election, had summoned in the Family, and immediately a radical group known as the Free-Informationists began to explore the possibilities of the Sygn. That’s why I’d been asked to come there, actually –’

  ‘You mean they’d been alerted to possible Cultural Fugue condition, they’d called in both Family and Sygn; and they still did themselves in?’

  ‘I can only tell you what I saw.’

  ‘Tell me what you saw,’ I said, wondering where exactly one stands to see a world destroyed.

  ‘You understand, I never set foot on the place. If I had, I probably wouldn’t be here. Everything I’ve told you up till now is just from my GI prep on my way there.’ Clym took a breath. ‘I was coming in on a slow shuttle, looking like your usual flowered business woman, aiming to land on a moon. We were in the viewing lounge, when a very large, very black woman stood up and pointed through the bubble dome: at the planet, with its tan tea-cosy of dry mists – only there were burns, glowing red, patchy, slowly pulsing, glimmering all across it. You could actually see them moving over the planetary surface! We all kept trying to translate that motion across the visible disc into a wall of heat rushing across deserts and canyons at hundreds of kilometres a second. And didn’t have much success. Then, of course, there was a swarm on General Info. Which, as you might imagine, was in chaos by now, since, as I said, it was based on a moon. At last one of the ship’s captains was finally able to get through. She read out the GI report as it came over: About twelve minutes before, in the neighbourhood of the equatorial complex of Gilster, a sudden flower of flame had bloomed to some three hundred kilometres in diameter. Within minutes, fireballs were springing up all around the equatorial band, with incendiary sheets rushing north and south, burning the surface dust itself.’

  ‘Fireballs? It wasn’t something as primitive as atomics –?’

  ‘Ah, but you’re not letting me tell you the most interesting factor.’

  I frowned.

  The Xlv …’

  My frown deepened. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Ever heard of them?’ Clym smiled over a leaf.

  I suppose some movement in my cheek or knees or shoulders, or perhaps the breath –‘The Xlv …?’ – I breathed through that vowel-less clutch of fricatives let him know I had. ‘That’s the other race besides humans who’ve developed interstellar travel.’

  Clym nodded. ‘A fleet of Xlv ships had been circling the equatorial belt of Rhyonon at perhaps a hundred fifty kilometres altitude. As soon as the conflagration started, they rose to three times that height and continued their circle. The fleet, apparently, consisted of three hundred sixty –

  When Clym was silent for second
s, I asked: ‘Three hundred sixty what?’

  ‘That was when General Info cut off. So we don’t know – one assumes it was three-hundred-sixty-odd of their mysterious, alien ships.’ (The Xlv are truly alien. In this epoch of brilliant translation devices that have broken through to hundreds of species on dozens of worlds, no one has managed to establish any firm communication with the Xlv.) ‘though it may have been three hundred sixty million. But for the next seventeen hours, General Info was open for no questions beyond elementary multiplication tables and what is the time at fifteen degrees longitude on Hephaestus VII – while Rhyonon burned itself out above us.’

  ‘Presumably they were still giving out basic navigational data?’

  ‘Presumably. Though, from then on in, the trip to that moon was so bumpy I wouldn’t be surprised if the captain was navigating us in by hand.’

  ‘Were the Xlv responsible? I mean, Cultural Fugue is one thing. But for another species from another world to destroy –?’

  Clym’s shrug – and perhaps his expression – halted me. ‘A day later, I was holed up on a very hysterical moon-side, with a very strange planet lighting up our sky – which is to say, it looked pretty normal again. Everybody who had been heading for her, of course, was held up in a kind of limbo-style detainment. Everyone had the same question you did. But when GI came back on, however long it was later, any request for information about the big round world up there – who named it, when it was settled, what its population was – or the Xlv, got you nothing but an “All information pertinent to your query is undergoing extensive revision.”’

  ‘What do you think must have –?’

  ‘In the Tyon-Omega system, where Rhyonon was the one habitable planet among twelve ammonia-covered, super-large, super-hot, high-gee gas giants, all information as far as I know is still under “revision”. And if you were to request any information, anyplace else in the known galaxy, about Rhyonon, you will get a really astonishing run-around of cross-references that, as you go pinning them down, will finally result in your question being declared nonsense.’

  ‘You’re telling me all references to an entire world have been removed from all the General Information systems on six-thousand-plus others?’

  ‘I can’t believe all six-thousand-plus have General Info. But on the twelve I’ve visited since Rhyonon that do – which are pretty widely flung worlds at that – it seems to be the case.’

  ‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘I’d be curious to see how they’ve set up the run-around circuit. I’ve seen some that were really quite clever.’ They’re frowned on by the Web but sometimes are necessary with information the kind of commodity it’s become. ‘I think when we get back to the conference centre, I’ll just casually put in a request for data about –’

  ‘Don’t.’ Clym gave me one of those strangely inappropriate grins that are the hallmark of his profession1. ‘I’ve been called in now more than once this month to dispense a couple of folk who, among other things, did. When you do, anywhere in the known galaxy, your security status automatically changes in your Web-dossier to one that, even if it doesn’t get you killed, will probably make your professional1 life difficult, to say the least.’

  I frowned. ‘Clym, are you telling me something I don’t really want to know?’

  Clym shrugged. ‘You brought it up.’

  During the silence I wasn’t saying anything in, Clym squinted off into the indigo, took a few steps forward, shaded his eyes, and turned his head left and right, for all the world like some dragon hunter out of my childhood on Velm (radar bow on shoulder, scanning the dawn for the flights of the more beautiful beasts). He was probably checking out some satellite schedule. I watched him with nostalgia and distrust. Since I couldn’t say, But why are you telling me all this? I asked instead: ‘What about the survivors, Clym?’

  His head swivelled back to lock my gaze with sapphire eyes.

  ‘Clym, a world is a big place.’ (Agents are carefully programmed psychotics – hyper-rational on all macro-behaviour, but, when push comes to shove, crazier than any number of coots.) ‘I mean, somewhere across Rhyonon’s entire surface some shuttle boat must have just been taking off with half a dozen passengers for a moon; someone must have been at the bottom of a mine shaft and sealed in, only to be clawed out by a Web rescue team in low-heat suits; someone must have been hauled up from the bottom of an ocean in a research bathosphere that happened to have its own air supply …?’

  ‘Rhyonon had three extensive artificially maintained underground river networks – comparable to seas. Their coverings were blown away and their contents were boiled off in the conflagration; their basins are now craters of fused and bubbled slag … as is about thirty per cent of the planetary surface.’

  I lowered an eyebrow. ‘I thought you said General Info was dead on the subject …?’

  ‘We are both –’ Clym gave a little snort that sounded like my favourite sister’s nervous laugh, which still gets on my nerves – ‘in professions1, where information leaks. The survivors … Why don’t you tell me about a survivor?’

  ‘Well …’ I frowned, wondering what exactly he meant. ‘Like we said, worlds are big. You say moderately populated. But I have no idea what Rhyonon’s population was. A third of a billion, if it was an average industrial world around for more than eight or nine generations. A few hundred million, if it was still being explored. If it was just an experimental station, it could just be a few thousands –’

  ‘It wasn’t an experimental station.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Your average survivor on your average world: she’d be about forty or forty-five years old, your normal fifth generation –’ I stopped. ‘No…’ (Clym’s eyes were bright, sharp.) ‘I have this sudden picture, this image: she’d be the lowest of the low, the person most people would think the least likely to survive such a catastrophe, perhaps some kind of mentally retarded idiot, who only came through because of some fluke that happened to …’ Then I laughed – it may just have been embarrassment under Clym’s bright, narrowing gaze – because I realized another image was fighting my imagination. ‘Another possibility: she’s a great sage, a genius, a hermit, a woman who’s fled the coils and toils of her society, living alone in some burning valley, or on top of some freezing mountain – at any rate somewhere as far away from the population centres as possible, busily devoting herself to the acquisition of spiritual knowledge, who, long ago, because she saw through the sham of her society’s pretensions, sequestered herself. And now, all at once, miraculously, she remains untouched …’ I faltered, feeling the frown at work through my features.

  Clym said: ‘None of us knows anything about the survivor.’

  ‘The …?’ I said ‘There’s only one?’ (Look. Listen …)

  ‘If there’s one or a hundred, we don’t know anything about her – or them. And yet, notice how we go on talking as if there were, as if there had to be.’

  ‘But to imagine the population of a world completely de –’

  ‘Exciting, isn’t it?’ Clym’s hand suddenly came forward to touch my neck. His voice dropped. ‘Within seventy-two hours, my friend, if we still know each other, I am going to take you by force, chain you in a special chamber I have already equipped for the purpose, and do some very painful things to your body that will possibly – the chances are four out of five – result in your death, and certainly in your permanent disfigurement, mental and physical.’ (We live in a medically sophisticated age. You have to work very hard to permanently disfigure any body.) ‘I’ve done some checking on you and found that you are a strange human being – at least to me: your sexual predilections run towards only one gender, and only of a few species. You make distinctions between pain and pleasure that are both baffling to me yet highly interesting to contemplate violating. You’ve informed me of the nature of your desire for me. It is only fair, I feel, to inform you of the nature of mine towards you. You are, of course, free to absent yourself from my company. But if you do not, what I
speak of will happen … though another woman, male or female, or any of several species of plants will replace you if you decide to leave. These are distinctions you make in your desire and pursuit of the whole that I, fortunately, am not encumbered with. Do you understand?’

  ‘Just tell me,’ I said, my throat dry, suddenly and uncomfortably so, ‘is this part of your job1 or just your way of being friendly?’

  ‘Though my sexuality is not part of my psychosis, they have been integrated carefully by some very clever people.’ She moved one and another finger (and from then on, ‘she’ was the only way I could think of her) against my carotid. ‘As of now, the distinction between work and pleasure is one I do not make.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  5.

  We got back to the conference with no further breach of politesse, at least as far as I could tell. I asked for an immediate transfer to another section of the seminar, meeting some sixty million kilometres away. Minutes later in my room, my callbox beeped approval.

  As I was hurrying down the hall to catch my shuttle boat, a tall figure, suited from feet to face in scarlet, ran up to me. ‘Skri Marq …?’ She made a few wriggling motions and scarlet fell away from her black cap, her silver-shot eyes (contact lenses? corneal tattoos?), her neck, her shoulders. Scarlet peeled from breasts, arms, sides, and belly, to float out about her waist like a bloody crenna. ‘Skri Marq, have you seen Skina Clym?’ I didn’t recognize the particular honorifics. Worlds that have them, have them by the dozens. But whenever you come to an official Web function, there’s usually a note somewhere among the cards, tapes, and fiche-crystals they present you with as you arrive asking you, please, while in Web territory, not to employ them at all. ‘I really must find Skon Clym. She’s such a fascinating woman. I am totally fascinated by her, you know. I only hope she is as fascinated with me.’ She dropped her head fondly – and a bit quizzically – to the side.