Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  ‘Are you a free-agented professional1?’ I asked.

  ‘Like my little friend, Clym, looking so much like you?’ She laughed, glancing about at the others, while I wondered what they made of all this. ‘No. Clym is crazy. I am sane. You will find that I am profoundly sane.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ Santine asked.

  ‘I? Where do I come from?’ JoBonnot shook her head. Collar petals flapped. ‘I thought you’d never ask. I am from a world where what you call night snaps about with lightning almost every day. I am from a world that sits on the edge of the Cultural Fugue and looks at you for aid and succour. Will you help us? Oh, I feel sure you would if you could. I am from a world where the Family and the Sygn contend to establish their incompatible versions of peace. I am from a world you may even know, Marq Dyeth – though worlds are big places and therefore you cannot know it as I do.’ She slapped her knees. ‘I am from Nepiy. Got unlimited space-fare, too – though I have to use it within limits. That’s better than some people you know.’ In a couple of awkward motions, she stood, while the petals suddenly flapped up to close around her face so that one could see her lips moving behind the mouth grill, her lids blinking behind clear eyescreens. ‘Would you like to check on my accuracy in delivering your sister’s message? Here, we’ve reached a call station. Between the Family and the Sygn, you know, there’s a war on – though it is many worlds away. In such circumstances, with the fate of millions hanging in the balance – yes? – I certainly would never let such an opportunity pass to check it out. Oh, no, Skyle Marq, that is not any kind of good diplomacy.’

  I frowned, starting to wave away her hyperbolic suggestions; but some misgiving made me suddenly stand. ‘Excuse me,’ I said to Ollivet’t and Shalleme. ‘May I use your photocall facilities? I’ll recredit it.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Shalleme.

  I stepped to the side of the room, where the connections are better. I thought through the access code (my name repeated on three musical tones, followed by the ammoniated smell of cut tolgoth). ‘Black Lars?’

  The blue fog of ‘hold’.

  Then Lars raised one claw towards her chest and said, ‘Marq, I’m so glad you called. Did you get my message?’

  I grinned, very much relaxed. ‘I think so. A woman called JoBonnot told me you cancelled our informal supper tonight? …’

  Black Lars settled back and dropped her claw. ‘Oh, I’m so glad. I knew you were out-of-city-limits, and wasn’t sure how to get in touch. We can expect you and Rat here in an hour?’

  ‘An hour? I thought you said supper was cancelled.’

  ‘Yes, the informal supper.’ Lars dropped her head to the side. ‘Didn’t you get the whole message? We’re having a formal supper instead. That’s why I cancelled mine. We begin in an hour.’

  ‘Formal?’ I asked. ‘What on Velm for?’

  She bent her lip ridge in laugher. ‘Nothing on Velm. On Zetzor.’ She reared up on her hind legs and folded four sets of claws together in a metallic knot before her stomach scales. ‘The Thants called up Max six hours ago, said they’d all just arrived. They made it clear they have something momentous to say, though nobody knows what. Everyone has been running around here as though fire-gnats had clustered under their vests.’ Suddenly she spread her left wing and beat it violently before her. ‘Well, the woman must not have remembered the whole message when she delivered it to you. I can see you looking confused. It’s understandable, Marq. She’s a foreigner from somewhere out near Hysy’oppi, and, though she’s very nice, she doesn’t know our local dialect terribly well. She was with the students this afternoon, and when I said I wanted to get to you, she volunteered to deliver a message. At any rate, our informal supper is cancelled. And you must be back within an hour, because we’re having a formal one in its place.’

  I started to say something, but her other wing now swept around before her.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there – we’ll be there, Rat and me.’ I blinked.

  And saw Santine and Ollivet’t and Shalleme sitting about the cushions in the small talk that always quiets when somebody goes to the wall to call.

  Rat still stood, still watched.

  JoBonnot was squatting again, now that I had come out of my seconds of call-trance. She turned to me with fragments of her grin visible through the grill. ‘Well, you have begun learning to what extent you can trust me – trust me to distort information. Because everyone does. Very good, don’t you think?’ She grimaced. ‘Not very much distortion? But that is what this Family/Sygn conflict is all about. A few more times, and you will have an almost trustworthy model of what to expect of me. Very good? That’s because I am so profoundly sane. I think eventually you, Skinu Marq, or maybe you, Skina Rat, will like that very much.’

  I looked around the room, at Santine, at Shalleme, and Ollivet’t, and suddenly felt very apart from all three.

  ‘No doubt you want to return to Dyethshome. With your good friend, Rat Korga. You are two in whom I am greatly interested, and I certainly offer my help. Oh, yes. The kinds of situations to which you returned at the hunting union will strew your path all the way to Dyethshome. And I have engineered even more restful, pleasing, and convenient ways to circumvent them than I did to get you here. Easy, pleasant, convenient, oh yes? Come with me.’

  Perhaps it was her association with little crazy Clym, or just the general confusion that seemed to inform everything.

  Did I start for the door, or for hollow-eyed Rat beside it? (Yet someone who is all that was ever desired is as much escape as home; and his eyes that were not there met mine.) I saw Santine start. I knew Doru and Doru were confused. I pushed through the spokes hanging at the door and knew Rat followed me. I heard JoBonnot call: ‘So quickly you go? Without me?’

  But I was already hurrying outside where seven city levels weighed over me and a topple down a million and a quarter years (non-standard) of archaeology hung below; as we rushed along the apartment ring towards the exit rollerwalk, Rat closing behind me, I was overwhelmed by how much, future and past, distorted all present vision.

  12

  Return to Dyethshome

  ‘Do you want to go through the run?’ I stopped at frilly dyll.

  Rat squeezed my shoulder. ‘Yes. Is it shorter?’

  I glanced up between girders. Park lights blotted the dimmer stars. ‘No. But sometimes you just feel better when you come out the other end.’

  We weren’t in the park, but in a fourth level industrial sector cassetted to look like one. And when we stepped through the mossy siding over the blue trough, we came not through the irregularly glazed ceramic walls of the upper level runs, but through metal ribs that joined at the peak of the vaulted hall.

  The foot pool before the door was half-covered with some organic slough. I didn’t step in it and didn’t remind Rat to. A rollerway moved sluggishly. I stepped on it, drifted forward of Rat, who a moment later caught up, looking around at the ceiling vault, at the tall, intricate, and unremarkable sculptures to our left. A section of ceiling lights had gone out, so the most remarkable thing about the pieces carried back at their evenly disordered distances (prescribed by city ordinance) was the shadow between them.

  Ahead, a voyeurlight glowed between two larger statues. As we drifted up, we saw two males, both evelmi, the smaller covering the larger, claws loose and legs tight about the flanks of the other, haunches, three pair, hunching and hunching. Both wore patches of simulated blue scales over their normal black and green. Both wore the double half-scaled cloaks, one at each shoulder, that most women – whatever their race, whatever their sex – have long forgotten began as a human attempt to imitate the great wings of the neuters.

  Rat turned to watch them, scratching his chest with naked nubs, then sliding that hand down his belly.

  ‘Rat, did you have runs … places like this, on Rhyonon?’

  ‘Yes.’ Another work of art, in darkness, passed. ‘But they were not – well, all over the way they are h
ere. And they were illegal. But we had them. The ones just for males like me – and you – were always shut down when the authorities found them, because the people who used them were too young. The ones for men and women stayed around much longer.’

  I chuckled. ‘Here, each neighbourhood is required to have at least three different kinds. But the runs were here before humans came. They’re an integral part of most Velmian cultures. We just moved right into them, at least in the south.’

  Rat asked: ‘And this is just for males here? Very tall, or very short ones. Like me? And you?’

  I frowned. ‘This one has the same makeup as the one we were in before. The style is a little different, though.’

  ‘But no females,’ Rat said. ‘No very tall woman, like the one who took us to the caves. They don’t come here?’

  ‘There’s nothing to keep anyone from dropping in to take a look,’ I said. ‘And we all do. But I believe there actually are some ordinances about forced participation in sexual acts in any run. By and large the character of a run isn’t so much a matter of edict as expediency. As far as height’s concerned well …’ I shrugged. ‘This one happens to be one we can feel at home in and also happens to take us towards – ’

  She must have been resting in a cushioned alcove beside the rollerway. She uncoiled, all in green scales, and sprang to the walk.

  Rat – I felt it in his grip – flinched.

  No, she was only a little taller than I was; but already I was seeing things in Rat’s terms.

  As darkened statues gave way to lit ones, she came towards Rat with a strange expression on her human face. (She was a female; I hadn’t been sure.) ‘You’re …’ she began. ‘You’re … really him. The survivor? I’ve called dozens of people, getting descriptions, composite and speculative portraits. I went everywhere I thought you might be. I knew you couldn’t have been where the crowds were gathering. But I also knew you had gone through a park level run out near Whitefalls this morning. I took a chance on a similar run, here, waiting for hours on the possibility – ’ She stopped, brought her gloved hand back to the opening cut away around her pubis. ‘I’ve been mistaken three times already … I mean, you are the – ’

  I actually started a diplomatic evasion, hesitating only over my confusion as to whether it would work or not, when Rat’s hand dropped from my shoulder. ‘I am Rat Korga, the survivor.’

  ‘You … really are?’

  I dropped my hand from Rat’s.

  She came a few steps up the walk.

  We passed some people strolling in the opposite direction.

  ‘May I touch you? Please! You’ve survived a world – and to both sides she turned her eyes momentarily, as lights swept back beside us, dark as Rat’s in half-light, before she stepped forward.

  Rat stepped forward too.

  ‘Please, I want to touch you – or you to touch me. That would be better – ’ She seemed suddenly to remember herself. ‘With your friend, if you like.’

  ‘I don’t want to have sex with a female,’ Rat said. ‘Now. Here. We came into this run because, on our way, we might find men – males. Here.’

  ‘But you – ’ She stepped closer. ‘I thought perhaps you’d be – you would understand. Because of what you’ve survived. I need you to …’

  Rat put both his hands, ringed and unringed, on the dark-haired woman’s shoulders. As we passed more lights, his eyes went from clear green to clear. ‘Leave this run. Please. I think you should leave this run. It would be better if you left this run.’ (I actually found myself smiling: One after another, Rat was running through all our polite forms of requesting someone to leave.) ‘I feel that you should leave – ’

  ‘Oh, but I – ’ She blinked, uncertainly. The coloured insignia on the patch of shoulder scales told of a job2 at a major distillation house, which left her job1 open.

  ‘Please leave this run,’ Rat said. ‘You don’t belong here.’

  She seemed to pull her wide shoulders in from under his hands. She raised one wrist up towards her mouth. ‘But I need …’ Then, with the beating eyes and intricate expression of someone who has learned some desperate necessity will not be met, she stepped back. Then, anger. Her noise was more evelmian hiss than human growl. She turned and walked off between some five women (all males or neuters, all but one evelmi) who had stepped up to watch.

  Rat turned to me. ‘Did I speak improperly, Marq?’

  One watcher reared on hind legs. ‘I’m glad you said it. It’s something we all feel.’ I wondered if we were going to have to hear something about human women being more likely to show up where they’re not wanted than evelm. A commonplace of the south, it still makes me uncomfortable.

  But there was only the soft boom: ‘Most of us are too polite.’

  The others laughed in a pulsing admixture of racial laughters. And the shortest one of them walked up and began to lick Rat’s face – the human, wouldn’t you know. Rat turned away; his hand, back on my shoulder, urged me on with a motion recalling the one I’d started him with on our way to the g’gia.

  We walked on up the walk.

  We walked off it, between statues, where now were three, now twelve, now two, some entwined with one another, some watching, now a hand, not his, lingering somewhere on his body or mine. Once we moved through maybe twenty, most in sexual contact with one another. In such groups, running, we were too close for personal recognition. Eyes, neither black nor silver, moved near, moved away, while others moved in to replace them, the many bodies centimetres away moving together, apart, in the warmth, a moment of cool as contact broke, then warmth again, to hold, to handle, and, even though we only moved through, as supportive as if we’d stayed.

  2.

  A dozen women wandered Water Alley, younger ones sprinting. As we came off the stairway, I saw gold claws lock the column across at the butchers’ union, and the face of the little redhead, peering over the other apprentice’s scaled shoulder. Then they were off inside.

  ‘Come on, Rat.’

  We started across cracked blue, when Si’id rushed out between the two kids. ‘Marq Dyeth …’ Her tone was conspiratorial, her arms heavy and hairy, and I recalled, from some drunken encounter years ago, her telling me that when she was in the bath and the water washed back towards her neck, all those hairs curved around to look like scales: ‘Excuse me, Marq …’ She was in front of us, so we had to stop. ‘I’m so pleased to meet your friend. I cannot say, with my poor single tongue, the honour it is. Really – ’ One hand on my arm, she guided me around, perhaps to avoid the people. Rat stepped around with me. ‘I have hungered all day for this honour – ’ A sudden grin. ‘But you saw, I had stationed my young ones out to wait for you – like hunters spying for the passing of dragons, yes? But then, it’s clear, the whole of Morgre has developed an appetite for our fine friend.’ She held a breath, making fists of both reddened hands; then she said: ‘You survived!’ A fist went high as Rat’s elbow. ‘You survived – what that must have required from you! What it must have meant for you. And what it means to us – ’ She bent forward. ‘What it means for any creature with a sense of her own life as a closed limited system. We are all famished for a taste of that survival, Rat Korga …’ Si’id pulled her lower lip into her mouth for a moment. Suddenly she stepped back to paw among robes and aprons. ‘It would be such an honour if you’d let us satisfy that appetite. I know your friend, Dyeth – ’ She nodded to me while she peered in one pouch, then thrust her artificially clawed hand in another – ‘would urge you to accept.’ From a left pocket she finally pulled a sampling knife. Multiple steels glistened from brass bladespines. Rubberized clamp and stained bone handle both looked well worn. ‘There’s very little pain involved. Marq can assure you of that, if you’re unfamiliar with the custom. But if you would give some of your flesh to appease our hunger …’ She reached forward with the knife towards Rat’s shoulder.

  ‘Will I be killed now?’ Rat asked.

  ‘No, but – Look, Si’id!’ I
took her wrist. ‘You can’t just run out and slice off a piece of meat to start a cloning culture just like – Hey!’ Because Si’id had taken Rat’s arm in one hand. ‘Come on, why don’t you let Rat come back some other day so that –’

  ‘But it would be such a triumph!’ Si’id pushed the blades and clamps against Rat’s shoulder.

  Rat didn’t flinch because, well, that’s just the way Rat was. ‘A triumph for the union.’ Si’id squeezed the sampler’s trigger.

  I was surprised, confused, and angry. I started to pull Rat away. But a microscopic needle, sunk to the bone marrow to gather generating cellular material, can hurt if wiggled. The three surface blades bit in to collect dermal enzymes and to hold the needle steady while it was digging.

  Si’id released the trigger. Somewhere from within Rat’s shoulder a microneedle withdrew. The blades came away from the flesh, leaving three little reddish lines, one of which spilled one, and another, then a third scarlet drop down Rat’s arm.

  ‘Oh, thank you!’ Si’id exclaimed. ‘Yes, a beautiful sample. We will savour the complexities of your flesh for years to come, and it will lend its subtleties to myriad complex meals. Marq Dyeth?’ Si’id turned to me. ‘Your new friend is a joy and an honour to Whitefalls. To Morgre. To our Fayne-Vyalou. To our world!’

  I started to say something ugly, but five or six women had stopped to watch; and two others were coming over. I took Rat’s arm, starting to speak and feeling him start with me so that speech was unnecessary.

  ‘Felicitations!’ Si’id called out after us. ‘What a wondrous pedigree this will begin. Wonderful!’