Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  We hurried away from the scooters, the red glare, the convergent arrows.

  ‘Our scooters,’ Shalleme said. ‘Are you sure they’ll – ’ It takes a good three minutes for the identidisc to activate a local retrieval system, and I think she imagined the scooters immobilized by the crowd before they could begin their journey. Me too.

  Some from behind were coming forward.

  The red location light and bright guide arrows had stayed where they originally had come on – probably because this particular rotunda seldom received deliveries of moving cargo; tracking lights hadn’t been installed here.

  A few women looked at us as we hurried by. (JoBonnot: No, don’t run!’) But most stared off at the red glow up from the floor between the three parked scooters.

  We edged between some women who weren’t watching us and some who were. Ten metres away, the wall of one of the block houses split on blue light. The slate door slid back. Blue flooded the floor. JoBonnot dashed through on to the meshed catwalk and turned to hand Rat, Shalleme, Ollivet’t, then myself among rising cables, descending hooks and pulleys.

  I looked back.

  A few were coming towards the doorway. One dropped to all sixes to run.

  From Shalleme: ‘But where are we—’

  JoBonnot said, ‘Your friend Skya Santine is waiting for us in the interlevel,’ and did something so that the door, much faster than it had opened, closed, shutting out our pursuers. The railed lift we were standing on lowered.

  Ollivet’t reared to stare at the overhead machinery.

  Shalleme leaned over the rail to gaze down.

  ‘Marq?’ from the shadows. ‘JoBonnot, did you find them?’

  I called: ‘Santine?’

  The tracer’s bulk came up. The lift shuddered, locked, and Santine leaned from the tank’s outrider. A bar light came on beside her, glistening along her flank. ‘Hop aboard. Well, it looks like you’ve brought a whole party.’ Santine was alone. ‘This way.’

  Squatting to examine the rail catch, Shalleme pushed something; the rail rose. She stood, looking at us to see if she shouldn’t have pushed.

  ‘Come on,’ Santine called again.

  From JoBonnot: ‘Go, now.’ She herded us towards the machine.

  ‘Climb in!’ Santine moved back from the forward outrigger; JoBonnot pulled herself up.

  We climbed on at mid-platform where cadets had ridden that morning. A bar light on one side of the tunnel went off; two on the other came on. Shalleme gave Ollivet’t a hand; she came, forefeet, middle, and rear, a furl of red wing-lining showing beside her bright tourist vest.

  Rat, in his roughened voice, asked: ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Anywhere you like.’ Santine grinned. ‘The crowd won’t follow us here. We can get you back to Dyethshome if you want. Or, if you’d prefer, you can visit with me in my room on Dylleat for a while – ’

  In her white skullcap, JoBonnot swung her head back around the drive housing. ‘I would delay returning to Dyethshome were I you. By now, that’s where everybody expects you to be. That is to say, you will be fairly traceable there, and not only by tracers. And for at least another hour or so, all the curious in Morgre will be trying to find you, now you’ve actually been spotted.’

  Ollivet’t exchanged glances with Shalleme, who leaned against the corner of the rear housing, red-sleeved arms folded over the fringed edges of her tourist jumpsuit, open below her navel. She said: ‘We’ve reserved a visitor’s room down in the Abakreg’gia – ’

  ‘– Perhaps you could take us there?’ Ollivet’t’s black eyes gleamed. She glanced around at Shalleme. ‘Or take us somewhere from which we could get there?’

  ‘We’ll pick up our scooters at …’ Shalleme stood up now and unfolded her arms – ‘… Dyethshome. We’ll pick them up tomorrow.’

  Once more JoBonnot’s head swung back around the tracer’s cab: ‘My honourable Skyshottyn, would you welcome our group to your rooms in the Abakreg’gia, if by doing so you could render great aid to troubled women?’

  Once more the foreign hunters exchanged looks. ‘Why should we refuse?’ declared, or better declaimed, Ollivet’t in a rumbling basso. Come share our space a while. And perhaps you can explain some of this confusion.’

  ‘By all means, generous Skynosheani.’ JoBonnot swung back and out of sight.

  The tracer tank lurched on its fat treads. Ollivet’t and Santine immediately sat on their rear haunches.

  Rat looked at both and squatted on the plates, ringed hand on the floor, swaying.

  Shalleme took hold of the support-bar on the back cabin wall and stayed standing, watching now the tiles, now the girders, now the stone walls of the passing interlevel.

  I put a steady hand on Santine’s scaled neck and bent. ‘Where in the world did she learn to drive a tracer?’ I whispered into the ridged auditory plate within the curved flaps of dark flesh just before her gill-ruff.

  Santine stuck a smaller tongue out the corner of her mouth and said in the blurred boom that serves evelmi for a whisper: ‘Probably from the driver-instruction program I revised for our local GI service about fifteen years – ’ and another tongue, somewhere on the other side of her mouth, roared, ‘standard,’ and (as Rat and Ollivet’t glanced over) went back to the whisperer, ‘ago now.’

  I scowled at Santine’s left eye, which blinked at me. ‘What I mean, Santine, is where could she have come from?’

  Santine turned her whole large face towards me. ‘Given the honorific system she uses, Marq, the chances are high she comes from Klabanuk … wouldn’t you think?’ Santine has never been offworld; but, prompted by her friendship with me, she’s done a good deal of otherworldly exploration in vaurine. Years back most of her trips had been limited to worlds I’d worked1 on, but she’d branched out since.

  ‘Where’s Klabanuk?’

  A bar light on the left swooped its violet across plates and flesh and rails and scales. Santine swivelled her head to me again. ‘It’s an open-run junction about twelve kilometres outside Hysy’oppi Complex – and Hysy’oppi, in case you’ve forgotten, is about fourteen hundred kilometres north, in G-19.’

  I frowned as another passing bar light lit our faces for each other. ‘Hysy’oppi is where you were born!’ I said, and looked down at Santine’s aluminium-coloured claws which darkened to gun-metal as our tank lurched around another unlighted curve.

  ‘With all your star stepping, I’d wondered if you’d remember.’

  I looked at the forward housing, somewhere to the side of which, and out of sight, the tall woman guided us along the bar lit dark. ‘Santine, what’s the difference between a Skina and Skyochot?’

  ‘I told you, Klabanuk was twelve kilometres away from where I was brought up; though I heard it enough when I was a child, I never bothered to learn the dialect.’

  We leaned around another corner; and the notion that this odd woman, whom I’d first seen almost a year and a galactic diameter away, hailed from only fourteen hundred kilometres to the west was enough to totally confuse. My mind leapt among explanations, from Santine’s possible mendacity to the possibility JoBonnot herself was a free-agented professional1 of a cunning to dwarf that of her erstwhile companion, Clym.

  I looked at Rat, who still squatted beside Ollivet’t, his bear hand over one knee, the other, on the plate, five fingers in a jewelled pentagon about which the rest of his tall weight swung as he watched slurred mosaics rush by in half-dark.

  We lurched as lift grapples caught us. Shalleme, standing, and Korga, squatting, swayed. I nearly toppled as side grapples hooked into our flanks. There are some outlying interlevel drops that actually use black-chain over two hundred years old; but not this one. We lowered down the near vertical slope.

  4.

  Several centuries ago, a northern tribe developed a ceramic cooker, essentially a large clay pot, called, yes, a kollec, which is where the term used in lizard-perch divination comes from, by way of a metaphoric leap. You put water (or someti
mes oil) in the kollec’s bottom, and in on top of that you put a complicated seven-layer shelf with various perforations for rising steam, various ducts to conduct juices down from one layer to bypass another and shower over another still lower. Food on the different shelves cooks at different rates. Juices percolate to form a general gravy at the bottom. Individual essences are collected in draining cups at shelf edges on their respective levels. Elaborate meals can be prepared with a single kollec, and in a number of northern cities humans have all but taken it over for their own foods – omitting the inedible flavoured stones and unchewable barks that still make up a large part of Velmian cookery but that we humans in the south are learning to appreciate if not actually enjoy.

  The seven-level urban complexes, sunk all over the variegated surface of Velm, have been compared to kollecs in drama, song, poem, and philosophical meditation so often, all over this world, that it has somehow passed beyond cliché to become a sort of classical figure by which Velmian artists of all races signify (almost always in the antepenultimate act of the work) that the drama is to be read as aspiring to a certain ambition.

  Abakreg’gia is under the base of the kollec, where the flames lick the bottom.

  When Morgre was sunk in ’43, ancient caves were uncovered, just as the workers reached the lowest point of the excavation, dating from perhaps a million and a quarter years prior to human arrival. (Could this have been the original Arvin? Yes, it could.) Work on the city was halted for three days; three days were devoted to detailed excavation, which was recorded in vaurine. Then the building of the city recommenced. Instead of filling the caves in, however, since they were at a depth below the official bottom of the city, they were turned into subcity dwellings.

  Five or six huge light globes hung like minor parodies of Iiriani in the sub-urban hollow. The small apartments had been refurnished just as closely to the primitive forms as the Velmian archaeologists could reconstruct at the time; then necessary modern conveniences were added. Velmian tourists can enjoy them for weeks at a time, and humans who are not addicted to the light of a real sun can usually enjoy a few days in the falsely lit darkness. We walked along the upper apartment ring of g’gia-9. The nearest light, fifty metres off in the central auricle, laid our shadows over the fallen stones and obtruding boulders.

  The amphitheatre at Dyethshome was modelled on one in a federation about seven hundred kilometres west at K’l’kl’l, built perhaps four hundred years back. But I have always suspected that the amphitheatre at K’l’kl’l was modelled – with how many intermediaries, no one knows – on the million-and-a-quarter-year-old one excavated right under Morgre, from a time when the Vyalou was radically lower.

  We came around another rock outcrop.

  ‘Here,’ Shalleme said, her eyes momentarily closed to consult the GI track guiding her.

  The door was a curtain of flexible struts of immature tolgoth, which was the functional approximation the evelm archaeologists could come up with to stick into the mysterious perforations along the upper lintel. The floor mat was old netmoss. The webbed wall hangings were based on ‘primitive’ designs from the Judedd’ji excavations at the South Pole, so only half a million years out of date.

  There were several modern stools.

  There were two modern tables.

  And modern means designed to be sat on (or at) by both humans and evelmi.

  A holographic window showed a section of Fayne-Vyalou, rather like the one we had hunted in today, supposed to be rather like the landscape around here when all this was above ground.

  Ollivet’t turned and extended her broad undertongue, in which she had obviously carried water for a day or two now, from their home. With an overtongue, she said: ‘Welcome to our provisional habitat, all my friends, close, near and distant.’

  Shalleme bent to touch her tongue to the liquid puddling the mottled flesh; then Rat; then me; then Santine; and finally JoBonnot. With each of them I watched for individualizing motions and movements, but even though I could sense them, I cannot articulate what they were.

  Shalleme went over to the wall cabinets to see what stones had been provided. (Rat moved to the side of the door, folded his arms, and stood for all the world as though waiting for instructions.) Ollivet’t went about placing her heavy claws first on one rug-covered cushion pile, then another, to test for comfort, lumps, or sharp things left under wraps. Santine went to one Ollivet’t had already plumped, tested it herself first with a forefoot, then a middle, then a hind, and curled down on to it, tail, tufts, and chin – then raised her chin a moment and purred appreciatively: ‘Marq, when was the last time you were here?’

  I went to another cushioned pile Olivet’t had tested and sat down cross-legged. ‘Ten years ago at the least.’ I wondered if Rat would join me, but he stood, observing from black sockets.

  ‘It’s always been a strange place for me,’ Santine said affably. ‘With a whole seven layers of city hanging above you in the dark, sometimes women here will be hit with intense claustrophobia. Yet standing on the upper level of the apartment ring, looking over the broken tiers of the million-year-old amphitheatre to the skene nearly two hundred metres down, the restored tiles glimmering, many also experience sudden vertigo. As a young woman, I recall coming here and going from one to the other in the space of seconds.’

  Shalleme had stretched out on her own cushion; and Ollivet’t, who had finally found some flavour-stones, came back past her with several in her foreclaws. She went up to Rat and offered him one.

  I guess he’d been on Velm long enough to learn that whenever you don’t know what to do with something here, lick it. After looking at it for the length of three breaths, he raised the rock in both hands to his mouth to taste.

  Ollivet’t, now that some formal greeting had taken place, settled back a little without actually sitting, which you can do if you have six legs, and asked: ‘Who are you?’

  From where she squatted, JoBonnot let out a sharp laugh. Her body mask had sealed to her neck again, forming a petular collar.

  ‘I am Rat Korga, who survived the destruction of the world Rhyonon.’

  ‘… destruction of a world?’ Shalleme pushed herself up on one arm.

  ‘How can a world be destroyed?’ Ollivet’t asked, selecting a stone for herself with one broad tongue, then going to offer Santine one.

  Rat said: ‘Fire fell from the sky. Deserts melted to slag. Urban complexes, runs through the wild, and tribal federations were scorched away like flavours burned out of over-charred foods. Cultural Fugue, perhaps.’ (It was about here that I realized these were all borrowed metaphors.) ‘Perhaps worse. I alone can say that I was there.’

  ‘And that’s why all these people are gathering, waiting.’ Santine regarded her rock while Ollivet’t moved on to me, to JoBonnot, to Shalleme. ‘I would have come out to see you too, Rat, but as Marq’s friend, I can see you even closer this way.’

  Shalleme, glancing at the rest of us who had come from such scattered spots over this one, asked, ‘What does it … feel like, to have lost an entire world?’

  ‘Lonely.’ Rat raised his many-ringed hand to rub at his neck under his broad jaw. ‘But the loneliness comes from the question.’

  ‘The question, hey, Skoilla Rat?’ JoBonnot, beside her cushion, rested only a white damasked glove on the webbed and re-webbed cover rug. ‘Tell a visitor to these alien climes what you mean.’

  ‘“What is it like to lose a world?” is the first question everyone who meets me asks; so I am alone with my own feelings, sights, sounds, and experiences, which can only provide answer to the question: What is it like to be presented with a new one?’

  I actually started to ask: What was the first thing I asked you, Rat …? I turned on my cushion, lifted one hand from the rug – and was left with silence, in which I discovered I didn’t remember the first question I’d asked him. And wondered if that meant Rat didn’t remember either.

  JoBonnot laughed. ‘It seems that everyone – at leas
t everyone currently in Morgre – wants to know who this survivor is, how this survivor survived. Odd, don’t you think?’

  Ollivet’t retired to her own cushion and sat, leaving Rat standing – like someone very used to standing, though. ‘But I am curious, too.’

  ‘You …’ Rat paused – ‘create me with your eyes.’

  While we were all tasting the odd flavour the statement left us, JoBonnot laughed again. ‘Ah, that is like a poem – like the kinds of words your glorious Vondramach Okk would have put together in her odd and awkward language, yes, Skynia Marq? But I have come a long way to see you, Rat Korga, a very long way. I did not make you by pressing my eye or my tongue or my ear to you. So that is what is wrong with poetry. I think your glorious Vondramach must have known that, for she was a great saint too, yes? I honour her greatly: and I look at you and see exactly what you are, Rat Korga. I look at you and see the clear and cloudy intersections of what you must have been with what you may become. And that is what I have come here to see. And I am pleased with it.’

  Rat watched her with empty sockets.

  Was it the singsong quality of her voice? Or was it just some diplomatic1 sense? I said: ‘JoBonnot, you’re not from this world, are you?’

  She gave me a bright smile. ‘This world? This Velm, that circles the larger of the binary, Iiriani/Iiriani-prime, swirling two moons about it as it goes? Oh, no. Certainly I could never be from this world.’ She shook her head. ‘Yes, that is a silly suggestion.’

  ‘Then why have you taken on the honorific system of …’ I glanced at Santine – ‘the Klabanuk area, off in G19?’

  ‘Did it fool you, perhaps? For just a bit?’ JoBonnot shook her head. ‘When we were together on the other side of the galaxy, I didn’t even know whether you recognized it. On your part, very diplomatic, Skeol Marq. Very diplomatic. Really it was the only recent program available to me on my own local GI series that concerned a region on your world anywhere near Morgre.’ She looked about the cave, let her eyes close, and drew in a lingering breath as if savouring the local actuality. ‘So I learned it – just another of the gambles one must take in my profession1. There is no way to really know if I have won or lost. I fool you. I get a little time: to sit and talk with you. To watch you. To learn. And to teach. I hope I can teach as well as you, Marq Dyeth.’