Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  Silence throbbed, a level after their departure.

  We walked out below the thirty-metre pillars. Korga looked across the maroon and blue tiles stretching between them. In the distance a wall of mosaiced reliefs and light-shapes curved and recurved.

  After a few more steps, Korga just stopped.

  He looked some more.

  ‘This is the second industrial level,’ I told him. ‘But it gets more ornate, the further down you go.’ The evelm influence. Humans seldom combine labour with anything this decorative.

  Most of the unions on this level are entered from the top. Here and there over the floor, carved gates stood around entrance portals; workers2 filed about. A few sleds, winged like dragons, with two or three women leaning at the rails, made their ways along farther transparent lanes. ‘We can walk,’ I told him, ‘or we can go up – ’ I pointed at a stairway to the overhead rollerways, fringed with ivory plants, indigenous to the hive caves one finds only in the north – ‘and ride.’

  Somewhere, wind rose a moment, then quieted. ‘Let’s walk,’ Korga said, eyes still up and moving.

  I began to walk.

  His hand shifted on my shoulder; Korga walked with me.

  As we came up over a blue, shaly outcrop, set each side with old statues that had belonged to some ancient labour co-op, here before the city was sunk, the sound of whirring treads cleared from the irregular underground winds.

  ‘Hey there, you – ’

  I hadn’t heard the tracer tank nearing us; I was surprised. I guess all the other attentions Korga had received today made me start to move off.

  ‘Marq, how are you doing there?’

  On the side of the big tracer’s twin cabins’ slant walls, with six handles both human and evelmi can hold, Santine hung and grinned and licked.

  As the tank rolled up on its tri-treads, some of the youngsters craned over the mid-platform rail. Once Santine and I had worked2 together in a fourth-level produce distributor union; and three years ago we had shared upstairs and downstairs living rooms, during a joint inner city labour2 break – from which I had left on several diplomatic missions1, then happily returned, days or weeks later, to the smell of excellent cooking. She waved a leg and a tongue, as the tank swept by, and called something into the grill – presumably she was telling the autodrive to halt.

  The rumble became a whine.

  The tread belts sagged, slowed, halted.

  Santine grinned on. ‘I’ve been looking for you. We’ve found enough of your garbage – since you got back from Beresh, Marq. But you, my friend Korga, have had a very clean visit so far. Though I assume you were both at breakfast …?’ which, as a greeting, was informal, illegal, and highly complimentary.

  It made me uncomfortable, nose to toes.

  Korga waited, his hand still, still on my shoulder.

  ‘Santine,’ I said. ‘How are you doing? And why are you doing it here?’

  ‘I wanted to see you and your friend.’ She let herself swing out from the outrider by one set of claws. ‘I hoped you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Korga,’ I said, ‘this is my old friend Santine. Santine, this is my new friend, Korga.’

  Santine leered happily. ‘And these – ’ She gestured towards the rail behind her – ‘are some of this season’s most promising cadets. Korga, you’re a student at Dyethshome now …?’

  Somewhere above me, Korga nodded.

  ‘Well, if you want to transfer and come to the tracer cooperative, we would certainly be happy to consider you.’

  ‘What is the tracer cooperative?’ Rat asked with characteristic bluntness.

  Santine looked first unbelieving, then laughed. Some students looked at one another.

  Santine, who after all has met other-worldlings before, said: ‘We … well, collect and dispose of the refuse that the women of Morgre leave behind them in the course of their material lives.’

  ‘They also record it,’ I said, glancing up at Rat; ‘they analyze it – that’s how they knew about our breakfast – they make maps of it, which are carefully charted against the maps they made last week and last year, so that they generate both a synchronic and diachronic picture of just what material life in this urban complex is doing at any point in space and where it’s been going between any points in time.’ Every sixteen-year-old evelm – and ten-year-old human – has to spend four months working and studying at the tracer cooperative, learning about the ecology of our urban complex, as well as learning the techniques of how to learn more about it. The ones with a feeling for it are invited to come back in fifteen – or ten – years as primary workers1. ‘Santine and I met when I was a very young and she was a very old cadet there.’ The tracer cooperative is probably the single most prestigious institution about the city: ‘The tracers also form the primary advisory council for the domestic and industrial boroughs that govern our complex.’ I turned to Santine. ‘Have I about covered it? You know that Korga is from another world.’

  Santine’s turn to be uncomfortable: ‘Our job1, yes, is complex. We try to do well,’ she said, a bit inanely.

  ‘I am complimented,’ Korga said, ‘that one of your profession1 would want to meet me,’ which is the kind of treatment a tracer1 like Santine expects.

  Santine nodded her large scaly head and smiled her large scaly smile.

  A cadet just behind her leaned over the rail and blurted: ‘But you don’t have a world at all now – ’

  Another just behind: ‘Are you going to live on ours?’

  ‘– here in the south?’

  ‘– at Morgre?’

  Korga looked at them.

  Two more had stood up to see him. One, I noted, holding on to the upright rail at the cabin edge, looked as if she had just been, or was about to be, very upset – two or three tongues constantly licked her upper lip ridge; her rust-coloured claws flexed on the upright pipe.

  ‘I do not know yet,’ Korga said.

  And for the first time I considered possible limits to his visit; beneath his hand, chills spilled my shoulder.

  ‘Well, if you do decide to stay,’ Santine said, ‘in six days you have to register for one job2 or another. I know it’s a little unusual for the invitation to come like this, but then, you are a somewhat unusual visitor in a somewhat unusual situation, Rat Korga. If you would like, we would certainly be happy to consider you at the tracer collective. There are advantages to the job2 – but I’m sure young Dyeth can explain them to you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Korga said, with that disconcerting calm; and said nothing else.

  ‘That’s very kind of you and your cooperative, Santine,’ I added; warm surprise overlay the chill. ‘It really is.’

  ‘Well, we’ll let you go on.’ Santine knotted her claws and rapped on the grill. ‘Come on! Let’s move!’ She inclined her head towards us. ‘I’m sure you have other things to do than stand around yakking the morning away with a bunch of tracers with shit under their talons and their minds on Arvin,’ which is part of the ritual modesties necessary to survive when you are that high up in a culture that so prizes egalitarian ideals. ‘Good to see you, Marq.’

  A chatter of tightening treads; a whine; a rumble; the tracer tank rolled away Santine and the gawking students, till ribbed hangar doors folded back, and they grumbled into a flood of blue; I glimpsed the grapplers that would carry them to the interlevel where they collected the refuse for their field work.

  ‘That’s really something,’ I said to Korga. ‘It’s funny, but I have no idea why this is happening. Still, everybody seems to know about you.’

  We came down the three rough steps in the rock to the tile level.

  ‘On my world,’ Korga said (and I glanced up at his eyes, expecting to see them gone crystal, but there had been no change in the light: they were still a human white and green), ‘it was always assumed there was nothing about me to know. Here, everyone seems to know everything. I don’t know – perhaps it is the GI they can’t connect me with. But the feeling, Mar
q – ’ His hand slid forward on my shoulder, then back, and he moved a little closer to me with the next step – ‘is much the same.’

  The tile floor here was mostly yellow. Five rollerways met above us to the left in a formation we used to call a star-junction … ‘Rat, when I was a kid, we used to call that … but then, I don’t know whether its name has changed or – ’

  ‘Why are all those people waiting over there?’ Rat asked.

  The hunting-union entrance was surrounded by a gate topping a low wall of reliefs carved from blue-black stone.

  Clustered around the entrance leading down into the union were two or three dozen people – some sat on portable mossmats that they had brought along. Most stood in little groups. On any other day I would have simply thought it was a bigger than usual hunting party collecting.

  ‘Excuse me. But perhaps you know. Is the survivor here yet?’

  Korga and I both turned. And I just knew Korga was about to say something honest and awful like: I am the survivor and this is my friend, or maybe, Yes.

  ‘Over there,’ I pointed quickly. ‘That’s the direction he’s supposed to come from.’

  The three youngsters hurried off.

  ‘Rat,’ I said. ‘What do you –?’

  ‘Why are all those people waiting for us?’

  ‘They’re waiting for you,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know why.’ I felt not only uncomfortable but awkward. ‘I guess we better just go on.’ I thought of back doors and service entrances – there was one to the hunting union, actually, on the abandoned canal system that you could get to by going about twenty-five metres down and through an archway humans had to duck for … We started forward.

  Something made me want to rush on. In the attempt to appear we weren’t rushing, I felt I was hobbling in slow motion.

  I don’t know how many knew what we would look like, or how they knew.

  I didn’t hear anyone shout (or whisper), That’s them.

  I know that the first few women we passed were not looking at us, or if they were, were looking at us as they would look at anyone.

  I know that the last ones all stood together, about a metre back from us on both sides, mostly smiling, a few gawking, evelm tongues a-twitter, human ones hidden behind teeth – smiling teeth, but teeth nevertheless.

  Someone about three rows back called: ‘Have a good hunt!’

  Someone on the other side said: ‘I was up on L’kr’l Slopes yesterday, and it was a pretty good gathering ’scape for – ’ till her friend nudged her.

  Because they were smiling, I smiled too. And even felt good about it – though the good feeling wobbled upon a fulcrum of discomfort.

  Korga looked around at them with a calm and unsettling expression about his green eyes, over his pocked jaw. The bright stones hung on his fingers.

  I lifted the hook.

  We pushed through the gate –

  – and dropped through on to the desert, set about with racks of grapples and radar-bows and portable blinds. Blue sky above us. About us a few union apprentices were carrying equipment here and there for even fewer clients. (I thought about whispering of my uneasiness. But the relief, surrounded by Korga’s silence, was almost as paralytic as the discomfort itself.) Beyond gorse-scooters, sand lay to a horizon under a streaked sky. The Hyte’s fumes twisted in an oestern colonnade.

  Korga turned eyes, gone silver under Iiriani, about the union.

  ‘A cassette,’ I told him. ‘Just like my room.’

  His hand relaxed on my shoulder as we stepped off the entrance plate on to sand. When a clerk came up, Korga dropped his hand to his side.

  ‘We want a tandem scooter for the day.’ My shoulder tingled. ‘I don’t know if my friend here can handle a number-nineteen bow, though that looks like his size. It’s his first time. He may feel more comfortable with a seventeen, or even a fifteen.’

  The clerk reared back and looked Korga up and down. ‘We have a few half-sizes in. Let me start her out with an eighteen.’

  I turned up my hands, dropped my head: ‘Do it.’

  The clerk hurried off between racked radar-bows. We ambled after her, among clerks and clients.

  I don’t know how the information followed us across the city; I don’t know how it followed us into the union. But when the clerk came back around the end of the rack with the beautifully scrolled black and silver radar-bow, I knew she hadn’t known before but that she knew now. ‘Would you …’ She held the bow out by its damasked wind-vane. ‘Would you try this one, Rat Korga.’

  Korga took the cross-piece with one hand and with the other grasped the web of bowstrings – clearly he’d never held, or seen anybody hold, a radar-bow in his life.

  ‘Here, just a second – ’ I grabbed the stock before the clerk did. She settled back, with faintly quivering wings. ‘Basically you handle it here – ’ I hefted the forestock – ‘and here.’ I grasped the arched shoulder brace.

  Korga took the bow by stock and brace.

  ‘That’s right. Now hook that around your – don’t let your shoulders hunch up!’

  He didn’t.

  And every seven-year-old human, not to mention seventy-year-old one, who feels for the first time that unsteady weight down on her shoulders (it always seems heavier on one shoulder, but you can never be quite sure which one) tends to hunch up her shoulders for the first few hours, if not the first few days, of wear.

  Korga got the stock, with its lateral indentation, under his arm; chest brace and alternate shoulder brace stamped their padded feet against his pectorals. Still, somehow their weights, with his own natural musculature working against them, seemed to pull him into the stance of a (human) hunter to the bow born – though one hand was down at the far end of the boomerang-shaped haft, where I’ve never seen anyone hold it.

  ‘This thing up here …? That’s to hold on to.’ I tapped the stained bone handle with my forefinger.

  He slid his left hand up the brace.

  ‘Wait! wait! wait – !’ the clerk twittered with three tongues, one after the other. She reached forward, released the spring-clamp between the two bone pieces that made up the grip so that it separated to its greatest width.

  Korga’s bare, big-knuckled fingers clasped the expanded handle. ‘What’s this?’ Rat asked, looking down with metallic eyes at the cup quivering on three small chains just under his chin.

  ‘Oh,’ the clerk said, ‘you put oil-soaked cactus bark, or various flavoured pebbles in there, and lick them. While you’re waiting for your quarry.’

  ‘You seem to have that pretty well,’ I told Korga. ‘Now just see if, still holding it like that, you can get into a crouching position – ’

  Korga squatted – which ended his natural hunter’s stance. I steadied his shoulder and didn’t laugh. ‘Not too bad. But try it more like this.’

  Diligently and dutifully, we three got Korga fairly comfortable among the vanes, scrolls, cords, sails, handles, grips, and braces of his bow. It seemed to fit. We went down two racks more to find me a size thirteen with an old-style selenium guidance system. (The new ones are supposed to be easier, but I’ve never gotten used to them. I’m offworld too much.) At various times two clerks and three clients looked around and between the racks to stare. At least three times I realized our clerk, even though she was fitting my bow, was a lot more interested in observing Korga than helping me. ‘We’ll take a couple of daykits,’ I told her, as she looked back at me for the third time. ‘Really, that should do it.’

  ‘Do you want to take a portable blind with you?’ she asked for the second time.

  For the second time I explained. ‘We’re only going to try the feeding grounds today, and since this is my friend’s first time, I don’t think we’ll need one.’ (Blinds are good for the spawning grounds where the dragons can get a little feisty.) And for the second time the clerk arched her upper gum in faint surprise.

  Any other day, I would have stayed around to ask about what the morning’s kollec on the
union perches had been, probably gotten into a conversation or two with some other prospective hunters, swapped two or three hunting tales and songs. But as we walked with our bows back among the racks of equipment, with this clerk staring and two clients ceasing their conversation as we came by, I just wanted to leave – and found myself angry and confused at Rat’s even gait, which took the hunter-union’s sandy ground no faster than the run’s yielding floor.

  I tried not to seem as if I were hurrying, and looked, I’m sure, like someone both hurried and confused. The clerk came with us to the scooter rack, stepped smartly around the back foils. ‘This one –?’

  ‘Here, Rat. You sit there – you can hold on either to this strap, or put your hands on my waist if that’s more comfortable.’

  The clerk lifted the large bow from him and joggled it down into the scooter’s side braces, guiding its sails into the sail slots and pushing in the positioning ratchets.

  My own bow went into the brace on the other side. I got my leg over, slid my bare butt back on the spongy seat, got my feet into the foot guides – which felt wrong. ‘Excuse me,’ I told the clerk, ‘do you have any human foot stirrups, to fit this one? These are still set up for evelmi.’

  The clerk dashed off, dashed back; the stirrups were changed in about forty seconds. Someone came to look; two others, already looking, walked away. I reached forward and pulled up the polarized sandshield.

  Through the curving plastic, I looked out on – not sands, lichen, and the far horizon. (They, we know, are illusion. And the polarization cut them out.) The scooter was standing on a metal ramp, with more ramps either side of it. Ahead was an ornate arch in a stained enamelled wall, its ornaments gritty with the dirt that collects on the real anywhere illusion reigns.

  I glanced back at the clerk, who was stooping on the sand to strap our daykit to the back bar, the Velmian sky brilliant above her, behind her the orange planes and reddish mountains.

  ‘All ready.’ She stood, stepped back.

  ‘Just relax, Rat,’ I said. ‘Hold on, and when we turn, lean with it and don’t worry.’ I looked forward at the shield – desert outside it, the enamel and metal of an urban traffic-way through it. With my heel I ignited the ignition.