Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  ‘You’ve been an ID over a dozen years, Marq. Perhaps half that time you’ve spent on Velm. But the other half you’ve spent on any number of dozens of other worlds. So your “world” is a bit more complicated than Dyethshome. Or even Velm.’

  ‘But you said –’

  ‘And as far as giving you Rhyonon – well, yes, there is a charred and smoking planet whirling about Tyon-Omega in an orbit that was Rhyonon’s. Perhaps in a decade or three, when some of the acids have sifted out of that cayenne sky, when some meteorological stability has reasserted itself, the Web may actually reexamine it, give it a new name, and consider – very carefully – another bout of planoforming, another influx of colonists. But as far as Rhyonon is concerned – the world of Rhyonon, the complex of information that was that world: well, as you have already heard, Rhyonon no longer exists.’ Japril stood up, stepped from her chair, and turned away from me. She joined her hands behind her back. ‘I said I was going to tell you about your relation to our survivor.’ She spoke to the window.

  ‘That is what you said.’

  ‘The relation’s very simple.’ (Listening to someone speaking towards someplace you’re both facing has always been hard for me. But people have stranger customs than that with which to decorate what they consider important statements.) ‘Besides being the single survivor of Rhyonon, Korga happens to be your perfect erotic object – out to about seven decimal places.’

  2.

  ‘What –?’

  While I frowned, behind her back Japril moved the fingers of one hand into a little bud of four with the thumb about an inch away – a sign, I suddenly remembered, on her world for something highly amusing. ‘More to the point,’ she went on, voice perfectly deadpan, ‘out to about nine decimal places, you happen to be Rat’s.’ Hadn’t she once told me folks on her world frequently make that sign of amusement without even being conscious of it? Oh, a diplomat’s life is not an easy one.

  As Japril turned back, I thought: What a strange thing to hear on an afternoon’s library research session ten thousand light-years away from anywhere – maybe seven hundred thousand k’s if you happen to think Batria is someplace; and I’m sure the odd three-quarters of a billion do. ‘How do you know what …?’ but stopped at the memory: dozens of times in an ID’s life fairly complete synaptic maps are made of the brain; and such things as Japril spoke of can as easily be read from my maps as from Korga’s – though admittedly mostly no one cares to. While I sat there, I actually recalled Japril, once when I’d told her I found males who bit their nails sexually exciting, asking me just what my ideal sexual type was. Go look it up in your files. I had said most curtly.

  She had.

  ‘It occurs to me, Japril,’ I said, wondering why, on top of that anger, I felt so strangely disoriented, ‘that in one version or another, I’ve been hearing references to this Rat Korga over half a galaxy now. Sex is no longer the mystified subject it once was. What you are saying, in a word, is: Rat and myself are sexually attracted to men. Also: Rat and myself both fulfil a number of tricks and turns of physical build, bodily carriage, and behavioural deployment that would make making love with each other not only fun but … well, rewarding. Now that’s part of the simple: truth – ’

  ‘The truth is not simple. I am saying a great deal more. And you know it.’

  ‘Still –’ I put up a hand, which in this gestural language means ‘halt’, in that one ‘full speed ahead’, and, in still another, ‘I have to go to the bathroom’. ‘You brought up the idea: as flattering as the concept is, with the universe as large as it is, I can’t believe I’m in a unique position.’

  ‘The most precursory run through the Web’s most accessible files of women directly or indirectly connected with us –’

  ‘The ones you happen to have the dope on.’

  ‘– show that there are some nine hundred eighty-two billion persons who fulfil the erotic preferences of Korga out beyond three decimals.’

  ‘Let’s see. That’s short, stocky, hairy, blond, kinky-headed, and male – if we’re to judge by me.’

  ‘I said we go to a number of decimal places. You’re still talking in gross description parameters. Now there are about seventeen billions, in those same files, who would find Korga sexually satisfying to three or more decimal places – before you ask, let me tell you: that represents a very small proportion of those whom we’ve actually got on record. And, if we ran the same crosscheck on the average woman, or male – you, for example – we would usually expect to come up with about two hundred billion takers delighted to get her.’

  ‘And only seventeen billion for Korga? That’s not your ordinary eroto-star, then. Well, I’ve never seen one I’d cross the street for – when I’m somewhere where there are streets.’

  ‘So your synaptic mappings suggest.’

  ‘You understand, Japril, I spent some of my younger days on some very strange – ’

  ‘Spare me. We all did, I suppose. Like you said, your reality isn’t privileged either.’

  ‘What I want to know about, Japril, is the overlap.’

  ‘Between the persons Korga’s attracted to and the persons attracted to Korga?’

  ‘Just in your most accessible files. You said “perfect” and talked decimals.’

  She regarded me a moment, and I could read nothing in her face. ‘About twelve million.’

  ‘Well … I said I wasn’t unique. Tell me, have you informed all twelve million of us on the list that Prince Charming has just been rescued from a blasted world and that – dare anyone do the wake-up routine with a kiss – the chances Korga will melt with reciprocal passion have been computed out to here?’

  ‘The metaphor suggests a cultural reference I may have missed. Nevertheless, there were only two names out of the twelve million that I was acquainted with personally.’

  ‘What would we do without quick GI surveys,’ I said, not asked.

  ‘I’d never actually met the other person – only heard the name. There certainly seemed no reason not to keep this in the family.’ (Yes, I listened awfully hard; but that ‘family’ definitely had a lower case ‘f’.)

  Then and there, you know, I got scared. It was a salty fear that brined the saliva at the back of my tongue. And below that, the disorientation. And below that, still, the anger …

  I took three deep breaths and asked: ‘Does Rat Korga know as much about me as I know about –’ Well, I didn’t see any reason not to – ‘him?’

  Japril nodded, which means ‘yes’ in one gestural language, ‘no’ in another. She said: ‘Yes, he does,’ and I wondered whether the nod was confirmation or ironic comment.

  Can I think of ten questions I should have asked? One: Why does the Web want me to know all this? Two: How am I supposed to … Oh, you fill them in. The one I came up with was:

  ‘Who is this other guy?’

  ‘… can’t remember,’ Japril said; or ‘… off on some expedition to another galaxy … won’t be back this lifetime,’ or something else maybe, but anyway to that effect.

  I guess that’s friendship.

  ‘All right …’ Still the anger, still the fear; and the absence between them which must be where desire lies. ‘You’ve told me that this Rat Korga actually exists; and you say you’ve told Korga I … exist? What … happens now?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll walk down a street, on a chance that you’ll meet; and you’ll meet … though, after all this set-up, you’ll know it won’t be all that much by chance.’

  ‘The rhyme suggests a cultural allusion that I’m not fami – ’

  ‘What’s important – to you, to Rat, and to the Web – is that you will meet. And I think we’ve almost reached the end of our conference time.’ Japril sat down again in her bobbing chair. ‘You now have the information we find necessary for you at this time. Would you like a recording of this interview to go over at your leisure?’

  ‘Oh, thanks. No …’ Full vaurine recordings are expensive. Besides, the particular Yinys
h folks with whom I’d been working recently are one of those cultures where everybody is always offering you everything just to be polite. And to be polite back you’d better refuse – or end up garrotted. ‘Really, no. It’s not necessary.’

  Japril smiled. ‘As you like.’

  And I began rueful years of regretting my idiocy. (Spiders, and especially Japril, offer very few things just out of politeness; and as an ID, I am well schooled in what these are likely to be: friendship frequently, sex infrequently, and hyperwave vaurine recordings, broadcast across light-years at tremendous expense, never.) What came to me then was something both daring and obvious – obvious because, after all, the business of spiders is to know what is known. But when I said it, I was more aware of the daring: ‘Japril, what about Cultural Fugue – or was it the Xlv?’

  She regarded me with one of her more mysterious expressions. (Were I someone from her world, would that long face with its broad mouth and small eyes be totally clear to me?) ‘Some time ago, you were informed that any GI inquiries after Rhyonon could lead to serious reappraisals of your security status. Well, for now, just consider that extended to cover the Xlv as well, at least as far as you’re concerned.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. Have I said? One thing I hate is anyone telling me what I can or cannot know. ‘It’s like that?’

  ‘In your case. For now. From now on.’ Her hand moved towards her pocket – for a moment I thought to pull out and wave her magic wand. But before she completed the gesture, she began to fade. I stood up with my most diplomatic smile – to find myself in a rectilinear garden of me’s – up, down, left, right, and diagonal. (It’s even more unsettling in weak gravity than it is in full.) I wandered along with, and through, and among a thousand ambling selves, till at last I was walking on yellow pebbles.

  3.

  What do you do with information like that: Somewhere in the known universe is the survivor of a world, possibly destroyed by inscrutable aliens – whom you’ve been given specific orders not to scrute – the information itself blotted out of the Web, yet still trickling along from world to world, star to star. Oh, yes: the two of you just happen to be made for each other. And he wears the rings of Vondramach Tyrannus.

  If you’re as busy a person as an ID invariably is – well, you don’t dwell on it. For very long.

  Nonstop, I dwelt perhaps six hours.

  During the next seventy-two, in which I got my tiles to Batria and my new job1 wrapped neatly up, my thoughts returned to it, oh, perhaps a hundred, maybe a thousand times. Dwelling? Well, don’t we all live with some such idea anyway: Somewhere in the known universe is the perfect woman for me?

  Maybe now I tried to visualize him – for that’s what he was, now – a little harder than one usually does. You can come up with near perfect that way.

  But perfect?

  At thirty-six years standard you know it can’t be done.

  Which I guess is what desire is all about.

  7

  Home and a Stranger

  I was back on Velm.

  Library sojourn and Japril’s message had, like all things, tumbled weeks and light-years into the past.

  My world?

  I had seen the friends I had wanted to see – Menek, Santine, F’namara. I had been at Dyethshome long enough to reach that state with parents and siblings where, if one is a traveller by nature, one withdraws a little in as friendly a way as possible, thinking on far pleasures while indulging near comforts.

  I’d taken a surface trip to a place, among Velm’s western geosectors: Beresh – I’d only heard it existed weeks before. (Worlds are big places.) I had gone to it, had looked at it, had loved it – had wrestled with its strange slang, its austere foods, its complex social rhythms. Velm’s world government is bureaucratic anarchy. That’s the plurality governing structure among the six thousand – the thirty per cent of them that have world governments. Syndicated communism comes next; then benevolent feudalism – which any communist who’s spent time in one will tell us is never all that benevolent; then oligarchic collectivism; then industrial fascism; and by now, we are well over halfway through the seventy per cent that don’t have world governments … just remember there’s no majority.

  Bureaucratic anarchy means a socialist world government in which small sections are always reverting to some form of feudal capitalism for anywhere from a week to two years standard – the longest we’ll allow it to last. Though I’d been hearing of these enclaves all my life, Beresh was the first on Velm I’d visited: verticals of blazing blue chalk, bright portable living rooms lying all over, some clustered together into small court groups of five to fifteen, others stacked maybe two hundred high, next to ersatz elevator towers, from any one of which at any moment a woman or a child might emerge to engage me – lurking about in my tourist reds – in bargaining for some part of my travel credit, for which they would perform in return bizarre and fascinating services.

  Then the trip home: fourteen hours by ten-propeller flying platform; another six by monorail.

  Home.

  And we remember what a complicated …

  2.

  I checked to see if my baggage was properly tagged with the little green discs that would conduct it through the interlevels and on, then loped off the rickety old roller-walk, crossed the broken blue bricks of Water Alley, and sauntered between the heavy columns flanking the entrance to the local outlet of the Butchers’ Union. Inside, high on the shelves, behind copper webbing, racks of cloned flesh thrust pink and red through the hooking rings. Longpig over there, shortpig – our term for the native flesh – in front of me and on the far wall, a host of more exotic insect, lizard, and worm meats. Prime cultures, says Si’id, who supervises1 the kids working2 this shop as well as the next outlet down; she’d go on for hours about the various pedigrees and provenances if you let her.

  I never go into a butcher outlet anywhere on Velm, or anywhere else for that matter, no matter the geosector, without recalling the first time, during my fifth trip offworld, that I was dining with my employer1 and her spouses for my third job1. (The feathers on everything; the very unsubtle music.) I was charmed when they served the meal on narrow plates, about three inches wide, curved around in a circle. You worked your way along from portion to portion – cunning I thought – eating with your fingers; though getting the tastes and smells so confused with one another would never go at home. There was the meat; and I began to tell them about the butcher outlets on Velm, and just what the cloned longpig I’d been raised on was, realizing as I spoke they were a little shocked. I picked up my own bit of roast, bit down – something hard was in it …

  Then I realized: Bone!

  This meat had once been walking around with a skeleton inside. Although I didn’t, many times when I’ve told the story, I’ve said I left the table.

  Inside, the stained-glass skylight lay reds and greens over the chipped stone flooring. Three other women waited with their director discs ready in claw (or hand), while the little human redhead who’d been working2 here as an apprentice for a standard year now swung and slashed with her broad bright knife; and the two other apprentices behind the glass wall were preparing outgoing orders: one kid, another human, with long tanned arms, the other, evelm, with gold claws on tufted greenscaled ones, tossed the packages into a clinking chain net that carried them out through the sphincter flange.

  Minutes later, I’d sent a kilo and a half of flesh, tagged with a green disc, on ahead of me. (Shoshana had said: ‘Marq, if you’re going to come home unexpectedly, couldn’t you at least see about your own food?’ So I was going to see about several of the folks’ today.) I was out the door again, through the gate, and on to the roller walkway – clink, clank, clunk, halt, bounce, go again. Blue noon-sky between the platforms of the two above-ground park-levels, like the scraps of dark blue cloth we cut up as kids to make patchwork maps of imaginary counties, clear and smokeless.

  Then overhead platforms pulled away.

  Fro
m the rollerwalk rail I watched pale cactuses drifting on my right, and the high boulders nearer and nearing on my left; we came around the cliff edge, to see the falls broiling on the rocks, and there beside it, its three free-standing multichrome walls rising two hundred metres each behind it, the black and silver pile: Dyethshome.

  3.

  I stepped off on to yellow sand, walked through a break in the lurid growth, and turned on to the variegated clay. Stone steps led up the terrace flags – the same green stone fronting most of the older manufacturing communes all around the city. Three of my siblings were playing in the pool by the rocks that turn white down near the water. Spray splattered the olive flags. Tinjo flopped Bucephalus, splosh! Bucephalus wagged her scaled tail, sheeting out metres of droplets. Small Maxa jumped up and down at the pool edge, afroth to her chest.

  Tinjo saw me – or Bucephalus smelled me; Tinjo squealed and the same moment Bucephalus was out of the pool and up by the carved railing on all sixes, shaking her scaly head – Large Max swears Bu is the finest looking of all this generation’s children, human or evelm. Bu lolloped across the stones, the wet tufts on her legs dripping about her claws, the scales on her back a glister of purples and browns. She leaped against me, bronze claws hooked over my shoulder (yes, the gold-clawed apprentice in the butcher shop hails from a different continent than Bu), small tongues playing over my mouth. I opened wide, so she could be sure to taste me properly. Her eyelids signalled madly the sign we had both agreed on, when we were fifteen years younger – me sixteen and just emerging from human adolescence, she fifteen and just emerging from evelm infanthood – would be my name to her: Marq Dyeth, I read. Marq Dyeth, Marq Dyeth (I blinked back Bucephalus Dyeth for all I was worth), while with her nether tongue, the one below the three she was tasting inside my mouth with, she was saying in that slow-motion basso: ‘Marq, you’re back! Where have you been? What did you see? Tell us how many stars you’ve swallowed since I last saw you? How many worlds have you chewed up and spit out – ’ which started me laughing, since I’d only been gone three days two thousand kilometres to the oest-east. I almost bit my (and her) tongue.