Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  All the sleeping shells, ranged in two levels, had facilities for domestic cassettes; anyone who brought hers with her and put it into the playback would erect a fuzzy black sphere around the blue plastic sleeping-pad holder, her own environment within. Usually one could count on eight or nine dark clouds.

  There was only one, in the far corner, fuzzily private.

  Usually less than half the students, up late talking together, ended up falling out together here in the dormitory, since there were enough individual living rooms further along the hall to accommodate many times the usual student load. This morning on practically every shell there was a student curled on green, yellow, or purple matting. They were all here … !

  Korga lay on his side in a shell near the centre, one frayed knee up, one out, unringed hand off the edge.

  All six shells directly around his were empty.

  As I started in among them, one of the students – the one studying Bybe’t Kohimi – raised her dark head and, blinking, recognized me: ‘You’ve come to take her hunting?’ She spoke softly. ‘It was wonderful when she came back here last night. We started talking with her. And she talked so simply … about her world, and what happened to it. Imagine!’

  And the evelm student on the shell beside her rumbled in her sleep. ‘Imagine … When she came back … imagine …’

  I gave her a smile nowhere near as surprised as I felt. I moved towards him among the shells. Someone turned on her pad. Another woke. I heard someone swing her legs from the shell to sit.

  They were waking each other.

  I reached his bunk – ‘Rat’ – took hold of his thumb, and pulled. ‘Time to hunt dragons.’

  He opened his green eyes slowly.

  The lids slid up the balls; that motion finished, his head rotated towards me; that motion done, he sat up on the shell’s edge and dropped his feet over – you have to understand this was the first time I’d ever seen a human wake like this. I recalled Japril’s descriptions of his waking after his rescue and knew now what she’d meant.

  ‘Hello, Marq Dyeth.’

  ‘Um … Rat,’ I said again. ‘It’s time to go hunting.’

  Another student was up and standing beside the dark cloud around the cassetted shell, pressing the call button and calling softly: ‘Mima! … Mima! …’

  As he stood, a muscle tightened on Korga’s jaw, moving the dark skin with its small, beautiful wounds, the irregular motion completely at odds with his inhumanly smooth movements. At his waist, for about eight inches, his chain belt had left link marks, while the pants themselves were now inches below; the hair down on the great knob of his ankle lay flat to the bone on the outside and, I saw as the foot moved on the clay, spreading as he put his weight on it, still hazy at the other.

  Another student in an upper shell looked down.

  ‘Mima, she’s gotten up …’

  As I walked with him out among the shells, I wondered at my own fascination at those places where sleep had inscribed his body at head, hip, and foot. I wondered too what had happened here before sleep. He had come as a student, yet I had never imagined his sharing their late talk, their brief or lingering affections. With no desire to keep our relation from them, I was still distinctly uncomfortable with what they might or might not have known. As soon as we reached the tiled pool, I whispered: ‘Rat, what did you tell them last night?’

  He looked down at me. ‘I answered their questions.’ And his hand came down on my shoulder.

  Which made me feel better. ‘What did they ask?’

  We started up the steps.

  He said (and I realized as he said it that what I had heard yesterday as roughness in his voice today seemed more like a resilient, a softened nap): ‘They asked my name, where I came from, what happened there; they asked why I came here, where I had gone with you, what we had done; they asked what we would do today.’

  ‘Oh.’ We neared the top door. ‘And you told them …’ From time to time I’ve bedded the odd student come to study, but till now better judgement had always made me put it off to the last few days of the session2 when the class is winding up and plans are being made to go home – for everybody’s peace of mind.

  At the top of the kiosk, the student who’d decided to lie guard at the entrance squatted on her sleeping mat, hugging her middle knees with her forelegs and watching. ‘Good hunting. Good singing.’

  I nodded, smiled, and tried not to skirt too fast around the fountains.

  On the stone steps up to the archway, Bucephalus and Black Lars (a step above) sat; and Alyxander (a step below) stood.

  ‘Good morning, Rat,’ Black Lars muttered in her sisterly basso that with age had begun to pick up the same burr I identified with Large Maxa. ‘Good morning, Marq.’

  ‘We were wondering if you two wanted to come and breakfast with us before you went off to hunt.’ Alyxander fingered one of the small grey jewels clipped to her genital hair, which – as a human woman – was all she wore mornings. Her head hair was feathery, short, and for some reason wet. The breeze shivered it a little. She stood on the uneven stones, as the rose ruff on Black Lars’ black neck shook to the same breeze.

  ‘Of course, if you would prefer – ’ Black Lars switched tongues and voice timbre in the midst of the verb – ‘to remain and eat with the other students, we would understand.’

  Always reticent with strangers, Bucephalus only moved her long tail twice to the left and twice to the right as it lay on the stones – which, she’d told me some time in the last five years, was a sign of friendliness the neuter evelmi in an isolated mountain tribe in the far south used with one another, a language and custom that had all but baffled some of this world’s leading ethnologists till very recently. I wondered if she thought this was communication.

  ‘Eh … well, thanks.’ I wasn’t sure if siblings or students were the breakfast companions Korga wanted.

  Rat said: ‘I would like to come eat with you.’ He looked at me.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Sounds fine.’ I mean they were trying to be nice.

  ‘Did you sleep well? Black Lars asked Rat as we started up the steps: she rose on her three downward legs as we reached them. Alyxander, on her human two, fell in beside me.

  ‘We came in to say hello to the students last night,’ Black Lars explained, looking at me now, ‘just as Rat was coming back. She told us about what happened to her world, about coming here to see you, that you were going hunting – and the relationship between you …’

  ‘I would have told you.’ I said. ‘Only I didn’t get a – ’ But Lars had turned back to gaze at Rat anyway.

  Last to get up, Bucephalus only bounded after us when we were practically at the door.

  We walked under the stone arch, the hanging green. In the shadowed mirrors I watched the five of us, Alyxander on two feet (the tallest), Bucephalus, on all tufted sixes (the shortest) – though she was also the longest – approach the doors.

  Rat and I were dull in the plates, which, in this light, showed scars and old scratches. We moved forward, among my siblings’ indistinct gestures, dim attentions, and shadowy concerns.

  2.

  ‘We don’t usually divert the water through the fountain and spillway system inside the house,’ Shoshana explained, ‘unless we’re having a formal party.’

  Alyxander had retired, with Bucephalus, about ten minutes ago, after presenting her food-gift and a polite minute of conversation. (‘It’s a shame we don’t divert the water through the spillway system more often, but we only do that for a formal …’) I was wondering what Rat made of the repetitions in conversations, in tastes: V’vish and Kelso, four minutes apart, had both brought small baskets of calla berries, which spoke of far too hasty planning. But Kelso, if I said anything to her, would simply protest: ‘You wouldn’t want him to think we were too stuffy …?’

  Rat sat cross-legged on the leather cushion, his frayed knee brushing my bare one, while the dry sculptures leaning from the empty pool wrote across my
memory the sprays and splashings complex meditations could activate – if I could recall the numbers, damn it! One after another of my parents presented herself with offerings of poached beetle flesh, fried cactus chokes, cheese, more calla berries, nectars, pickled lichen, or simple sucking stones.

  Still, caught in some seven- or seventeen-hour ritual occasion on another world, I’ve often thought our informal breakfasts (which never last more than forty minutes) must be the optimum towards which all civilization tends.

  This one lasted twenty-five.

  And seemed to go on six out of a seven-season year.

  ‘Would you come look at my mines?’ Small Maxa said with a slight incline of her head as she gingerly set down a tray of warm meat-patties.

  ‘Yes.’ Rat stood up on a motion, his feet deep in the cushion.

  Maxa blinked and looked confused, because there was no ‘of course’, or smile, or phatic politeness.

  She glanced about – suddenly she grinned, turned, and called, ‘Come on, then,’ and bounded off, with Rat striding after her over the sandy floor.

  ‘Black Lars,’ I said, in whose room we had been sitting for fifteen minutes now, with the sandstone walls to our left and the sky scribed with the towervines growing from the rocks to our right, ‘what in the world is going on? I mean, one brings people home to bed, and everyone is very nice. But why all this?’

  ‘A fascinating human, a wonderful woman, don’t you agree?’ Black Lars dropped her head to the tray Maxa had just brought, wrapped two patties in two of her tongues, and held them up for me to choose.

  I bent down and took one in my mouth, and nipped at her gently a few times with a motion considered horrifying in a number of evelm federations in the far north but which, here, in the south, is accepted as the best we four-limbed, two-jawed creatures can do. I sat back pensively and chewed: spiced shortpig. ‘Yes, he’s fascinating. But I’m biased.’

  ‘Your Korga takes food from my mouth – ’

  ‘– and mine,’ I said.

  ‘– like some barbarian from the equator.’ The bony ridge of her upper lip arched – a sign of humour here but, I could not help recalling, of distress only as far away as Beresh. She turned and licked at her gill-ruff with many tongues at once.

  ‘He is from another world,’ I said.

  ‘And that’s what fascinates.’

  I frowned. ‘Black Lars, you’ve travelled to almost as many worlds as I have. We’re both in the same profession1. Why are – ’

  ‘I’ve travelled to half as many worlds as you have, Marq. I only work on worlds where, as on Velm, there are admixtures of both human and nonhuman societies – as you know. This is not the situation for you and your human sister, Alyx. And my jobs usually take three times as long as yours to perform, which is a thing we have discussed before.’

  ‘Oh, Black Lars – ’ I put both my hands below her aluminium-coloured claws and squeezed the rough pads from which they extended. Her long spurs closed to the back of my hands. ‘In a moment we shall sound like squabbling northerners. And I know those squabbles, even here in the south, are real – ’

  ‘When we came into the student quarters last night,’ Lars said, ‘Korga told us of Rhyonon that had been destroyed. A whole world: that’s frightening, Marq. And Rat Korga is the living sign of that fear, as well as the sign for the possibility of surviving it. Rat told us the journey here was to learn of our world. How wonderful that you lust so completely for someone and someone so completely for you. Because Rat is a fascinating, and frightening, woman. But then, we are all fascinated by what terrifies. Go.’ Before I could say anything, she loosed one claw, bent forward, and put out her smallest tongue near my ear and made it say: ‘Take Rat Korga dragon hunting. Then the two of you come back to sup with me – an informal supper. Just us. Bring food if it would make Rat more comfortable. I love you, Marq.’

  ‘I love you, Black Lars.’ I turned to lick her tongue, still humming from where it mimed vibrations mine could only make in conjunction with voice box and oral cavity.

  Maxa materialized in the lichen-hung entrance bower, pushing aside flapping leaves of grey and purple.

  Rat, hands at his sides, walked in behind her from the limen. Maxa turned to grin at him.

  Rat said: ‘I have never tasted anything like that before. Your mines are beautiful.’

  And Maxa, leering with pride, pressed pale fists to her thighs.

  Now Tinjo came in with an older woman (human) I did not know and some bark pudding. The woman and Lars recognized each other and started laughing about something. And Tinjo kept on taking up Rat’s hand and saying things I guess she thought were poetic. But that’s Tinjo.

  Jayne stepped out of the entrance practically as Tinjo, with Maxa before and the woman after, went in.

  A swaying evelmi followed her, someone I knew Jayne spent much time with recently, but whose name I still was not sure of. Both Jayne and her friend dropped lieg leaves at the edge of the sand (which you do ritually if you’re not bringing food) and apologized that they both had to run.

  And ran.

  Immediately Sel’v and Large Maxa came in with a shallow tray of spiced oil and commonplaces about the weather around the Hyte. I said something about hunting. Sel’v curled her tail through the sand and expanded her green tufts. Max’s wings fanned once as she settled, blowing sand against the wall.

  The tray went on the sand that Black Lars smoothed under it with the midleg’s brush.

  One after another we bent our faces to touch our lips to glimmering yellow. After they had left, with ritual good wishes for the hunt, I glanced at Rat, to see his face still coated, cheekbones to dripping chin. I took up my napkin and laughed. (He hadn’t touched his own.) ‘Wipe your face – like this – and the rest of the meal will be much more comfortable for you.’ I gave him mine to wipe with.

  Hatti materialized in the luminous glow behind the leaves and came quickly through them, across the sand, green bark clutched in her hand. ‘I heard you were breaking your fast with us, Marq, And with your new friend, Rat Korga. Here are some tasteless nothings to cleanse the tongue since I am so late.’

  ‘A fallen shell is not only beautifully curved without and brilliantly coloured within, it contours the currents flowing about it,’ I said and nodded.

  And Korga, who had heard me repeat this traditional greeting eight times now in twenty minutes, repeated it himself for the seventh and, though it was completely inappropriate for anyone not in your own nurture stream, totally charmed another of my mothers.

  ‘I grow some of the edible rhisomes indigenous to the north in the grounds around my room,’ Hatti explained. (Boiled, chopped, and mixed with alum they numb both human and evelm tongues.) She stepped down and opened the bark to show her breakfast offering. ‘A little of this, and you will be ready to hunt.’

  Black Lars turned her head to take the obligatory lick at the mud pool – obligatory, fortunately, only for the host.

  Hatti (my mother the nematode geneticist,) pressed her face into the chopped roots and raised it, with morsels sticking all over her mouth and chin.

  Rat, who by now had learned, bent forward and licked off a few and then a few more. Hatti turned to me. I licked some from her cheek and then one from her nose. Hatti turned to Black Lars, who, with one tongue, left a spot of mud on Hatti’s forehead and with another took off a few pieces of root.

  Hatti sat back on sandy cushions. ‘You’re very sure of yourself, Rat.’

  Alum tingled my tongue, obliterating the tastes of volatile oils and corrosive juices.

  Rat just watched her.

  She said: ‘You have firm lips.’ Standard end-of-breakfast talk, it happened to be true. ‘Soon I hope we will get a chance to converse for a length of time, free from the oils of hunger and the stones of flavour.’

  ‘Good,’ Korga said for the ninth time. ‘I want to talk to you too.’

  It was grossly impolite. Still, I’m sure all my mothers translated it: ‘I want to
taste what lingers behind your lower lip,’ and made exceptions.

  And Black Lars and I both – because we’re really rather alike – mulled on the changes in this opening meal of the day that had occurred here in the Fayne-Vyalou to make it performable by (not to mention acceptable to) infiltrating humans.

  Hatti held the leaves up before her face, turned, and hurried through green and purple.

  Black Lars looked at us again, her broadest tongue extended now, cupping water that she had held in her mouth from the meal’s start. One of her tongues beneath asked: ‘Would you like the final drink before setting off?’

  Rat got up on his knees, leaned forward, and, one hand supporting the mottled flesh, sipped noisily.

  ‘No thanks, love,’ I told her. ‘Got to dash. See you this evening.’ I pushed up from sweaty leather. ‘Rat, if we’re going to get to the hunting grounds …?’

  ‘Good hunting,’ my sister said. ‘Good singing.’

  3.

  We walked across green flags, over coloured clays, between ivory cactuses, along clinking brown rollerways that carried us under overhead parks. ‘We’ll have to stop off at the hunting union to get gear. You negotiated breakfast well. Here in the south, because we use such a range of feeding techniques – hands, implements, communal and individual feeding, or what have you – it can get pretty confusing for a human like you. Or me,’ I added; then felt awkward for adding it. ‘Anyway, it can get pretty confusing for humans. Or evelmi – ’ and felt more awkward. ‘I mean for anyone who’s only used to one.’

  Korga said: ‘It was much like my home.’

  I looked up.

  We were ambling across the blue stones of Water Alley.

  ‘On my world,’ Korga said, ‘people wore hanging masks that dangled in pieces before their face. They were only supposed to turn the masks aside to eat or make love; or sometimes if they were working hard. On my world both love and food could get even messier than they do here.’

  I started to protest. But I’m diplomat enough to know that even on a single world one culture’s variegated informality can be another’s unholy mess. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘if you would be more comfortable, you could get such a mask for here. No one would mind – ’