Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  And missed.

  ‘Max! Shoshana!’ I called from the ramphead. ‘Egri! Guess who’s with us this month.’ I came around the walkway, the bright fan-blades flashing behind grills in the high walls. I glanced to the side, waiting for her to catch up to me – so I could take her arm, I realized; which is what I would have done with any human or evelm from this particular locality. But polar Zetzor is not Velm’s M-81. I slew the impulse. ‘Nea has something she wants to talk to you about.’

  As we came to the bottom of the ramp, Nea held out both hands, red foil, right; green, left. ‘Max, Shoshana …’

  Shoshana stood up from the stool of the big console-size reader. ‘Nea? How have you been! What in the worlds are you here for? It’s wonderful to see you. But – ’

  ‘Are your parents here?’ Large Maxa rumbled affably from her perch. ‘It would be just like the lot of you to leap stars and not a word to anyone that you were arriving! You should have let us know – ’

  ‘It’s just me, Max.’ Nea laughed. ‘And I almost had to break laws to get here. I’m officially enrolled as a student. But the real reason I’ve come is for advice.’

  ‘You came all the way from Zetzor, by yourself – for advice?’ Shoshana’s smile was disbelieving. ‘Really, the way you people flit from world to world – like gnats from one side of the Hyte to the other.’ She put her hand on Nea’s epaulet. I saw Nea start to pull away, then remember she was not on Zetzor. (My social picture of the dark life in the canyon at 17? Endless horseplay of a distressing violence and stylization, laced with scabrously affectionate invectives, in which no two people ever touch. I’m diplomat enough to know it’s a distortion, but it’s a distortion of something there.) ‘I’ve visited fifty worlds by vaurine projection – ’ which is how most of us satisfy our tourist urge – ‘and two in vivo, when Egri took us to Kensitty. But,’ Shoshana declared, ‘I will never understand unlimited space-fare!’

  ‘Neither do most of the shipping officials in the Zetzor north-quadrant spaceport. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’ Nea stepped away from Shoshana, and looked up at the perch. ‘Egri, I thought maybe you could help me. I mean you’ve travelled from world to world and know the problems that occur between them. Thadeus thinks there’s an opportunity to go to Nepiy as the Nepiy Focus Family. But it would mean …’

  I went over and stood next to Shoshana, who leaned against the twelve-foot totem carving from some far north geosector (anchored three ways to the tolgoth planking by antique, black, flat-link chains), looked attentive, and did not listen as Nea retold with more detail and less clarity what she had outlined to me in the amphitheatre. The strange things about perfect erotic objects (when perfection is out to that many decimals): though you can remember dozens of details about them – a backlit ear clawed with rough hair, casting shadow on a pitted jaw; the wrinkle of a vein beneath thin skin lying over the ligaments fanning to pronounced toe knuckles; the wide lozenge of a thumbnail gnawed back from the callused crown, a knuckle below bright metal and brighter stone – still, you can never remember the woman; that is, you can never remember your sense of the woman as a self; at least not the way you can with any number of friends, acquaintances, or even some stranger, say, glimpsed frowning down at a gaming machine as you pass the door to a recreations lounge, maybe an outlet servicer logging her cheeses on the transport skid halted on a ramp from the lower level, or even some Web official with a mound of authorization stamps on the desk before, and a bank of check-out lights glittering behind, now half a galaxy away. Someone once pointed out to me that there are two kinds of memory (I don’t mean short- and long-term, either): recognition memory and reconstruction memory. The second is what artists train; and most of us live off the first – though even if we’re not artists we have enough of the second to get us through the normal run of imaginings. Well, your perfect erotic object remains only in recognition memory); and his absolute absence from reconstruction memory becomes the yearning that is, finally, desire. That socially surrounded absence, when you’re young, masks a lot of things in the real world; when you’re older and a few thousand sexual encounters have begun to clear what desire is about (or perhaps what really lies about desire) and you have begun to perceive desire’s edges, its effect is not so much that of an obliterator any more as it is that of a distorting lens. If you can smile at what you see through, it’s sometimes illuminating. That was the distortion I was experiencing now, so that when Nea suddenly exclaimed:

  ‘… but things happen on Nepiy that can’t happen here! You can’t imagine how different that world is from Zetzor!’

  – what I saw was not the cities blasted into the shadowy walls of the canyons that worm the polar plates of Zetzor (its equatorial regions clotted with lichen jungles, fused deserts, and fuming bismuth swamps that make the -wrs of Velm seem like ancient carburettor leakings); what I envisioned was a scape of silicate sand, airs darkened to dim gold by dusts too hot to bear; and through kilometre after kilometre of umbrial dunes, the only irregularity beyond the grit rush was one shadow, barely human, stalking away. I imagined it; and thrilled to my imaginings – even as I realized that, like all our images of the alien, it comprised the simplest recombination of the familiar: the hotwinds that ravage for three months across Velm’s own southern temperate zones transposed to Velm’s own north-polar wastes.

  ‘Well, you were right to be upset!’ Shoshana announced at my side. ‘The Family/Sygn conflict is in the process of creating a schism throughout the entire galaxy, concerning just what exactly a woman is. And it may mean that instead of one universe with six thousand worlds in it, we will have a universe with one group of some thousands of worlds and another group of some thousands of others, and no connection between the two save memories of murder, starvation, and violence. And in a situation like that, no, you do not just simply decide to up and change sides! Even to become a … Focus unit!’

  ‘Not just a Focus unit,’ Large Maxa said gently. ‘A Focus Family.’

  ‘It’s the fame,’ Nea said, a green fist and a red fist tight against her hips. ‘Honestly, it is. A standard year ago, now, when we last visited a world called Ulus, we passed through a geosector called Ajegit and stopped at a city named Skesss. Among the white roads that wind the twelfth and thirteenth above-ground levels – Ajegit’s bedrock is too hard to have underground stages as you do here – there was a major traffic artery, with shops and public art works, called Dyeth’s Row, named after your seven-times great-grandmother. Thadeus made sure from GI; and we all went to see it.’

  ‘My dear,’ Large Maxa said, letting her green and glimmering head lean to the side, her gold eyelids sweeping across her onyx eyes and some of her tongues a-twitter beneath the bony arch of her upper jaw, ‘there are half a dozen streets called Dyeth’s Row scattered about the various urban complexes all over Velm. No doubt there are another fifty scattered about the cities of other worlds. Mother Dyeth toured with Vondramach for a while, both on this world and others. There was much pomp, much ceremony. Streets, parks, and concourses were named after various heroes in the Vondramach entourage. But that means nothing now. None of us have ever walked down more than one or two of them. Nor is there any reason why we should want to. And besides, to share a name with fifty or a hundred-fifty streets out of the hundred billion streets among a hundred million cities, most on worlds not ours, is not fame. What could it mean, to us or anyone?’

  ‘It meant something to Thadeus. And Clearwater; and Eulalia too.’ Nea looked first at one of us, then at the other. Her skin was the ashy brown of a woman pigmented dark by heredity who has lived most of her life on a cold world at a pole turned eternally from its sun. ‘They very much wanted us to see it – that’s why they took us there in the first place. They were proud for you, and proud for us that we knew you … A Focus Family becomes a model unit for the women for an entire world. We would have streets and parks named for us … at least on Nepiy.’

  ‘It’s to be expected – ’ Maxa boomed in her langui
d bass, though she had begun to flex the muscles that moved the spurs on the back of her hind claws; I wondered if Nea knew her well enough to recognize it for a kind of nervousness. (Though on most evelmi from the Fayne it indicates intense joy.) A second tongue took up ‘– on a world that received a touring entourage of Vondramach’s a whole seven ripples ago. It means nothing today.’

  ‘Magma!’ Nea declared, turning again. ‘It meant something to me, Max! Egri, Marq, you’ve travelled between worlds more than I have, unlimited fare or not. You mean to tell me that on this world or another you’ve never gone to visit a street just because it was named for the Dyeths?’

  I haven’t and was going to say so.

  But Egri said: ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘And didn’t it mean something to you?’ Nea looked like she might cry.

  Egri kneaded a bony elbow with her knobby fingers. When she spoke, it was even slower than Max. ‘The point is, I think, that what it meant to me was very different from what it meant to Thadeus. Or to you.’

  Maxa gave that thunderous hiccup that passes for an evelm humph! ‘Just up and changing sides like this, it makes me think they’ve been part of the Family all along.’ She began to step around on the other little platforms that made up the rest of the perch, though her voice went on in its low, leisurely roar. ‘That kind of irresponsibility is a Family characteristic.’

  ‘Fiddle,’ Shoshana said. Her job2 for the last year or so has been in an electronic instrument house. Fiddling, she tells us, is a very old term, whose origins no one is sure of, which means making small adjustments that are nevertheless absolutely necessary – though it seems to be connected somehow with some very ancient music. ‘Nea, I understand how upset you must be. And I’m even moved that you came all this way to talk about it. Simply because it’s as serious as it is, we just can’t make assumptions like that, Max. Zetzor, Ulus, Nepiy, all of them are very far away. We don’t really know anything about them – and no,’ because Nea had raised one fist up to her shoulder, not in anger but in frustration. Still, Shoshana knew how easily Thants can take offence, even if it never lasts more than a month. ‘I’m not saying the tastes of any of your words suggest spoiled ingredients. I am simply saying that no meal yields up all its flavours at the first bite. Without contradicting a thing you’ve told us, I’m sure there must be more to it than that. We haven’t talked to Thadeus. We haven’t talked to Eulalia.’

  ‘Do you think I’ve been able to talk to them either? Not to mention Clearwater. I mean really talk to them? I know what they want, what they’ve said, and … some of the things they’ve done to get it. It makes me very frightened. Shoshana, Max, I don’t know what to do!’ Her last sentence was softer and shriller than the ones before. It’s so easy to lose the nature of the distress when dealing with the crisis of people from another culture, much less another whole matrix of cultures – which is what a person from another world always is. ‘If Thadeus, Clearwater, and Eulalia do go off to Nepiy, what about the rest of us? Should we go with them, with some hope of sabotaging – ’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Egri said. ‘You’d be guilty of treason – and caught for it in the beat of a pearlbat’s wing.’ Still squatting she put one foot down on the next inlaid platform, toes curling on the ornamental side.

  ‘Or should we stay where we are, working on the Family’s side to change their – ’

  Egri simply laughed, flexing the toes of both feet. ‘Soon you will have things too complicated for anyone to follow. No, let’s try something more straightforward, more in touch with what you feel.’

  ‘But I don’t know what I feel!’ Nea declared. ‘I’m frightened! I’m confused. How am I to know what – ’

  ‘Are you hungry?’ Egri asked. ‘Are you sad – ’

  ‘I don’t …’ and here Nea gave a little shudder, her fists and her lips held tightly. (I have been told that children, in the livable climes of Zetzor, are quickly taught not to cry: stoicism is a great virtue there and is expressed in all sorts of flamboyant ways.) ‘I don’t …’ she repeated. ‘I can’t …’

  Then, beside Mother Dyeth’s silent personality column, light turned riotous in the entrance mirrors; mirrors swung in.

  Bucephalus came lolloping inside, turned, and took the stance of an evelm dragon hunter many years older than she. On the other side of the door, Tinjo (who is a love, but also a bit of a coward) peered around the edge.

  Small Maxa ran up to stand right by the jamb.

  Bronze head, bronze feet, bronze hands, bronze torso bright with Iiriani outside: heaving up a brazen forearm, George Thant shoved Small Maxa across the chest back against the multiple hinges and strode through, going from bright to umber. ‘There! You are there! Nea Thant! Thant! Nea! Thant! …’ (Have I explained how the folk of northern Zetzor use the order of your names to render crushing insults both to intimates and strangers? Oh, never mind.) ‘Treacherous pupa! You are claimed as a sister to me! But you are as a drop of yellow poison in the clear currents of our Family’s love!’

  8

  Strangers and Visitors

  ‘You have come here to betray your kin to the viper and the ant. You have disgraced your ancestors and your progeny. Your treachery has shamed me, hurt me, confused me, and I would weep tears of hot vinegar if I could!’ (Stamp, stamp, stamp – a reference, I believe, to a curse contained in an oral epic from equatorial Zetzor which, for the last few decades, had been popular at the poles.) ‘You have squandered ice and soil, jeopardizing the entire custom of unlimited space-fare, won for you by the work of your illustrious father, Thant Thadeus – ’ (You can also proffer resounding compliments that way too.) ‘– and your melodiously sung mother, Thant Eulalia. As you know, and that knowledge must be your shame, unlimited space-fare is limited only to those uses which will broaden minds and enrich cultures. If one is caught abusing it, it can be rescinded at any moment!’ (Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp – five stamps, I think, was an allusion to some parodic use a Zetzorian academic poet of the south had made of that equatorial epic.) ‘You have besmirched two parents’ joy at your birth and deepened the memory of pain your bodily mother, Thant Clearwater, still bears from her womb-work. Four siblings’ shouts of laughter and cries of pleasure have stilled in a night of fire and chagrin. Oh, Nea – ’ (Stamp; which I guess was just George – ) ‘What did you call yourself doing, coming here like this? Now I am burdened with hauling you back. Thadeus commands it. Who knows what crazed notions you’ve left with your friends, the glaucomas and retinitises and cataracts with which you’ve infected their eyes so that whenever they gaze again in our direction, all their vision will be obscured by disease … !’ George stalked back and forth, vituperating and stamping like some brass engine whose proper use no one can divine but which is nevertheless clearly malfunctioning.

  Nea opened her mouth, then closed it and her eyes. She opened her eyes, her expression for a moment nearing rage – once she actually got out a ‘No … !’ She closed her eyes again, touched two foil fingers to her dark forehead, and shivered.

  ‘… spawn of a sewage pump, descendant of a slime mould, all genetic congruences we share are discredited by your infamy and actions. How could you, female son of Thant! See how I wring my hands and wring my hands once more, till the flesh goes raw on my palms. I have searched swamp, dry-plain, and canyon for appropriate execrations, and have yet found none for the nuance of my distress …’

  Shoshana and I glanced at each other. Years ago, along with V’vish, Kelso, and Alyxander, we had taken a vaurine-projection tour of Zetzor, basically to learn something of our friends’ world. ‘Probably saw more of it than any of us ever will,’ was Thadeus’s curt comment, on their next visit when we began to ask what we thought were polite questions. But while we were touring the ever-light south, we had gone to a theatre in the well-touristed city of K and seen an evening of energetic satire in the public theatre about the northern Zetzori. (Not that the southerners aren’t strange.) One particular skit concerned a north
ern mother, from a Family enclave, going after a runaway child; it wasn’t unlimited space-fare that was in jeopardy that time but some local county tax-rebate the youngster’s presence in the mother’s labour cooperative assured. Still, the gestures, phrases, even the stamps were practically the same. And there was George, from north Zetzor’s 17, raving on and acting like a South Zetzorian parody of herself. It was funny and scary.

  By now some of my other parents – Jayne (who is human), Kal’k (who is evelm), Sel’v (evelm), Hirum (another human), and Hatti (human), and finally my sisters Alyxander and Black Lars (one human, one evelm; both IDs like me) – had come up on their various lifts to watch, quietly and wonderingly, at the scene taking place in our west court vestibule.

  ‘I do not know my actions,’ cried George, ‘yet what I have done and must do is lit by the reflections of starlight-gathering mirrors along the thousand-kilometre glacial fields.’ She marched back towards the door, then stalked forward again, stepped to the side (stamp, stamp), then back. ‘I do not know my feelings, yet the feelings I have already anent this matter, as well as the feelings I know are to come, rack me as lava from Kromhatch Kone shatters frozen scalings collected on the south face. Oh, Nea – ’ She seized her sister’s shoulder and pulled her towards the entrance – ‘let’s go!’

  The doorway, anticipating their exit, had not bothered to close. George dragged Nea stumbling out across the patio. Small Maxa, as the shimmering plates swung in, crouched in the doorway and began to cry.

  Large Maxa swayed, platform by platform, down from her perch, her wings showing now and again their inner scarlet. First Jayne, then Black Lars, next Hirum moved to Small Maxa. The earlier shove from George she had taken fairly well. But she knew the Zetzori’s aversion to contact. When George had grabbed Nea’s shoulder, her reserves had broken. She squatted in the doorway and sobbed.

  One, and another, we went to my crouching white sister, stooped to pat at (but not touch) the ivory fists bunched on her bony chest, to lick at (but not touch) her lightly veined ears, to rub at (but not touch) her knobbly human back.