Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  ‘You will be old soon, too. Oh, yes, Marq Dyeth, isn’t it? You are aging nicely.’

  I extended the spit, and Abrak’d nipped off the dressed leaves, purring approval. I continued on, looking for a cable now to hang the empty hook over. The rinsing fountain? I stopped beside it and plunged the hook into one of the bubbling basins, turned it about, shook it, and decided I might as well set it again. To the right was a free display stand, hung with shaved and crackled skate-belly. Little knives and ornate scissors still swung from their chains. I took some snips of brittle gold and fixed some to the spit barbs –

  ‘There you are!’ Another spit-end waved in my face.

  And another. ‘There, Marq!’

  Before me on the ends of damasked tines: from Bucephalus some worm roe (my favourite), from Tinjo some calla berries (which I could have done without). I bit from one; I bit from the other. ‘Don’t you two think you should be spreading yourselves out? Mmm,’ which was because I liked the roe. ‘You’re looking older every day, Bu.’

  ‘And I suppose I’m looking younger,’ Tinjo said, acting human, acting sly. I frowned.

  Both of them laughed and turned to the three-tiered rinsing fountain.

  ‘Come on, come on.’ I hooked my spit on the overhead chain; it moved off, swinging. Stepping up between them, I slapped the back of Bu’s scaled neck and roughed the curls over Tinjo’s human head. ‘We’ve got guests now. Spread out and use different rinsing fountains, will you?’

  Both turned to me with the same look of amused consternation on their so different faces, registering with such different signs a look I would like to have believed was universal between siblings in any social grouping even resembling a stream – but which I know is not. Bu projected a tongue: ‘You can hardly get near Rat. I love you, Marq,’ marking her both as an alien and my sister.

  I grinned.

  Tinjo giggled.

  Bu rose on her hind claws and lolloped away, carrying her spit high. In the other direction, off marched Tinjo.

  I went on between shelves, racks, carts, cabinets, and guests. I passed by the ornate stand on which Japril had parked Egri’s krutchk’t before going off to circulate, and took down a passing spit still unset, hooked its twisted tines with seared lichen, and turned towards where I thought Rat might be.

  A metre or so from the furnace, some seven or eight guests clustered. Her long-handled fork set with something that needed a few moments’ fire, Shoshana thrust the spit through the grill, while flames licked from tiny triangular openings at the fluted corners.

  As I came up, she withdrew the spit and examined the grey dough, touched here and there with gold, sizzling against the metal. ‘Your friend, given her age, is almost too popular.’ Shoshana smiled. ‘I shall feed Rat this and go see about some others.’ She turned to extend the long spit over the shoulders of the gathered guests.

  In their corner, I saw Rat, turning with eyes now green, now silver, to nibble from a bit of blue leaf on one guest’s long fork, now from the worm meat at the end of another, now from the cactus curls at the end of still another, while still another and another joined them. I watched, amid the roar of complimentary chatter, as he turned to bite here, to bite there. A confection of hot cheese and grated nuts, as it came away in his teeth, strung down his chin, so that he tried first to toss back his head to get it in his mouth, then to lick it in; failing, he seemed to forget it and turned to bite at something covered with toasted crumbs, half of which fell as he bit, so that his long face, chewing and biting and moving, looked not like a woman’s, evelm or human, but like a sick dragon’s or an acned ape’s.

  One guest, Vizakar or Clent, left. Two others, Vol’d and Mammam’m, came up to extend spits set with the evening delicacies over backs and shoulders.

  As Rat turned here and there to bite and bite, his eyes – green, glass, silver, green – caught mine. The muscle in his cratered jaw bunched and bunched. One shoulder moved. He raised an arm. Holding his own spit in his ringed hand, he held it out towards me. The tines were set with some salad such as I’d fed Abrak’d. I bit into leaves, richly sour and peppery, and looked down the foreshortened rod leading to his fist’s knotted and jewelled knuckles: knuckles, gnawed fingers, knobs of bone, knots of muscle, wrist, forearm, biceps, shoulder. He grazed on what they fed him, trying to keep looking at me with an expression not a smile but on which I could have certainly written one.

  I thought to extend my own spit. But Rat’s arms were longer than mine.

  I couldn’t have reached him.

  While I chewed, somehow in my distraction, his tine hit my gum. Trying not to show it because it was an accident, I drew back at the pain, behind the others feeding him.

  He could have fended their clogged attention.

  If he had been used to our formal affairs, he could have parried this fork or that with some light comment or general protest. But as I watched, trying not to bring my hand to my sore mouth (he still held out his spit to me), I was struck with a moment’s vision where, through his stranger’s clumsiness and my fellows’ eagerness, these most formal and age-old gestures were rendered as absurd-looking as if I were experiencing them for the first time in some society organized about principles and prohibitions unknown.

  I nodded to him uncertainly, trying to chew and take cognizance of the flavours in my mouth. (Was that blood …?) I stepped back, nodded again …

  He put down his arm, went on eating, went on watching. More guests came, extending food and compliments.

  Bucephalus had been right.

  You couldn’t get near him.

  I tried to smile, though my face may have remained as blank as his.

  Then I turned, hurrying off among high racks, low furnaces, falling and flopping fountains.

  Japril had stopped by a stand on which rested my bone dish with its wooden dowels draped with the meaty multi-flavoured ribbon, from which she was cutting a small section with one of the new food shears Shoshana had gotten for the party, then fixing it to the bobbed tines with what were, incidentally, our stream’s oldest set of tongs, and, all in all, thanks to GI, looking far more comfortable with my local customs than I felt. She turned as I neared and, replacing tongs and knives on the hooks at the stand’s edge, extended the spit towards me. ‘It’s wonderful to see how clear are the marks of your aging since I saw you last.’

  ‘Five minutes?’ I asked.

  There’s a certain kind of intellectual irony that GI is not set up to deal with. Japril frowned.

  ‘But of course,’ I said. ‘You mean from last year.’ With my teeth I tore, tastefully, at the rare meat on the end of her spit. ‘Thank you, that is good, if I do say so.’

  She looked around for a rinsing fountain. One ear was lit from her hovering sunburst. Her face still bore what I assumed was distress from my flippancy. But as I fell in beside her, she said: ‘Marq, tell me again about all those people gathered outside Dyethshome.’

  I chewed. ‘I don’t know quite what you want to hear.’ We wandered by another furnace, ducked beneath more dangling spits.

  ‘They’re all here for Rat?’

  ‘As far as I can tell.’

  ‘Marta just called in to say that the rumour among the crowd is that your offworld guests have come here across light-years of night to meet him too.’

  I frowned. ‘I suppose that’s possible. But I doubt it. Still, we don’t know why they’re here, really. Yet. But what I think far more likely is just that our friends outside, since they’ve all come to gawk at Rat, haven’t really considered that anyone might want to drop by for any other reason.’

  ‘Dropping by when folks are doing it on this scale – ’ Japril stepped up to a fountain basin whose rim was set with luminous grey stones – ‘becomes another rather fuzzy-edged phenomenon.’ The stones were almost identical to the ones she was wearing – and though I’d seen that particular fountain hundreds of times before, I’d just never made the connection.

  ‘Pardon?’

&n
bsp; ‘Sorry. I was just talking to Ynn.’ She plunged the spit, and swivelled it, making foam along the brim. ‘She says that in the last half hour the arrivals have gone from just under a thousand to over nine thousand people outside; they’re backed up for almost a kilometre. About two thousand have arrived in the last ten minutes alone – ’

  ‘Nine thousand?’

  ‘Another two thousand are expected within the next few minutes.’ She raised the spit’s business end and shook down droplets on the water. ‘I have to go hang this up somewhere and set food on another free one, now, don’t I?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Of course,’ remembering the spit, already set, I held. Protocol forbade me to offer it to someone who had just fed me. And Japril was wandering off anyway, no doubt having been reminded by GI how unnecessary formal leave-taking was in formal situations.

  I turned from the basin, saw a cable full of empty spits go by on my right, saw Santine brandishing a set one off on my left. Where, I wondered, had the Thants gotten to – and came around between three of the hall’s rough stone columns, with a net-hanging between them almost too old and worn to discern any of the pale colours of its intricate knots.

  The privacy clouds – except Thadeus’s – were gone.

  They had gathered near a large, three-winged furnace. And even through Thadeus’s multichrome glitter, I could see the human figure, the back curved almost to a hump, the shoulders and knees extraordinarily thin, the hair wild, the eyes all shadowed within the careening flicker.

  They held no forks, though a cable carrying dozens of them jerked and jangled just beside them.

  Thin, white, curly-haired, Small Maxa was the only person I saw near them. She carried a spit at her side. At the bottom of the single step, she moved along, observing with a combination of awe at offworlders and the ease which comes from knowing that, however alien, they were only human – an awe and an ease I fancied a younger me had possessed; and which I thought, in her first visit, I’d read in Alsrod.

  Maxa paused, then extended her spit, set with some meaty dyll nut sections, towards Eulalia, whose jewels had settled low at her shins, bobbling. Eulalia was talking with Fibermich. It seemed she didn’t notice Maxa’s gesture, though Maxa’s dyll hung less than ten centimetres from her mouth. She didn’t turn away. She didn’t acknowledge it. She went on talking.

  It produced the oddest sensation in me.

  After a few moments, Maxa took a step back and leaned forward to bring her tines to the same distance from Fibermich’s lips.

  I frowned. Lifting my own spit, I walked to Maxa. I started to say something jocular, but Maxa’s expression, as she leaned to present her offering, was pained. Had she been any other sibling, parent, or friend, I would have put my arm around her. But because she was Maxa, all I could do was what she did.

  I extended my spit towards Eulalia, my offering hanging centimetres away from the dyll.

  ‘… civilized around here, but of course it’s the furthest thing from it, really. Are they human? Yes, but they’ve been reduced to beasts …’

  I wasn’t really listening to Fibermich’s response to her mother. But the sudden discomfort, and perhaps a memory of Rat, glutted with more offerings than a human (though not an evelm) might swallow, made me think that, somehow, if I tried another Thant, it all might be rectified. I stepped to the side, to move my spit from Eulalia to Clearwater; at the same moment I saw, from the corner of my eye, Santine approach with a spit hung with some of Shoshana’s pickled worm.

  ‘… reduced to animals who copulate with animals, call animals their sisters and mothers …’

  ‘… so old,’ which was Santine. ‘All of you, so marvellously old.’ Somewhere between Maxa and myself, she brought forward her own spit in her foreclaw, her dark and scaly head, with its luminous gill-ruff, heavy with tongues poised for with compliments. ‘Really, you, I, all of us are looking perfectly ancient …’

  ‘… not as if they don’t acknowledge it themselves. Our way is older, purer, human. And animal as they are and act, they know it …’

  I’m not sure where social discomfort interfaces with social panic. Perhaps some sign of distress in Santine – or Vol’d, who had followed her, or Mammam’m, who, I saw as I moved around the gathered Thants, had apparently been standing just behind them, her own unrecognized spit extending only centimetres behind Nea’s right ear, still as a hunter poised for the shot – produced a paralytic astonishment at this incomprehensibility. It made me step even further around and actually thrust my spit into the glittering confusion of Thadeus’s cloud.

  ‘… reminds me of the stories of our shepherds up at the equator. Those little furry creatures they drive about the slopes? Well, you know the jokes about the male shepherds and their favourite fur-balls in the pack …’

  Sudden as some contrivance governed by a timer, precise laughter exploded from all six Thants. I looked from one to the other. Before Alsrod, who was speaking, another delectably set spit hung.

  ‘… but our equatorial herders at least have the decency to be ashamed of their indiscretions …’

  I followed the spit down to the dull claws of my mother Sel’v (the travelling composer1), who, now that she’d) joined us, straining forward with food, let go the faintest sigh of confusion. I saw her gum ridges start to arch, then go taut.

  ‘… eat and procreate, eat and – but one can’t even say that. Not only the males with the females, but the males do it with males, the females do it with females, within the race, across the races – and what are we to make of neuters – as if they had not even reached the elementary stage of culture, however ignorant, where a family takes its appropriate course …’

  There were at least ten, now, circling them, spits extended, straining towards faces and mouths that refused any converse other than among themselves. There was another fusillade of precise hilarity. We circled, waiting for them to taste, refuse, disdain, even insult. But all they did was ignore. I moved aside from V’vish and bumped shoulders with Shoshana. Both leaned forward among the others that had gathered, unable to retreat in the paralysis of breached protocol.

  ‘… so old …’

  ‘… so old …’

  ‘… aging beautifully, really, truly …’

  ‘… marvellously old …’

  Ritual compliments, from worried tongues, at all volumes and timbres, threatened to drown whatever the Thants recited among themselves.

  ‘… to call them animals, you know – the humans among them, that is – suggests an innocence that, frankly, they don’t warrant …’

  ‘… criminal then …’

  ‘… a disease is not innocent, and this equation of unnatural crime with innocence is, in itself, a disease, which can only be cured by the most primitive means: quarantine, fire, prayer …’

  Somehow the whole dinner had become polarized between Rat, who would accept anything offered and – since manners demanded one not feed the same person twice – the Thants, who, accepting nothing, had become a dam against which all must eventually break. The circle around the Thants thickened, with siblings and guests. Now Alyxander, lower lip between her teeth, extended cactus curls. Now Black Lars lifted her midclaws again and again in anxiety, with a foreclaw extending her spitted sarb-bulb one more centimetre than politeness would tolerate towards George’s bronze lips.

  ‘… their own bad smell, where they sniff it out in those elongated troughs of depravity that run through the land, where the females are allowed to be as licentious as the males …’

  We are slaves of custom. No one knows that better than an ID, who is no less a slave than anyone else. My shoulder ached from holding out my arm. I moved my leaves now to Nea, now to Alsrod, now to Fibermich, now to Clearwater, trying to think of something to do. I had the vaguest notion that if I listened to what they were saying, I might understand what they were doing. But though I heard their words accurately enough, I understood nothing. Because each notion I arrived at was arrived at in desperation,
it crumpled on desperate contradictions. A memory of Rat – I suddenly felt the first impulse to forsake custom, throw down my spit, and return to him. What halted me, I think, was that I now saw, among those trying to donate some food or flavour or nourishment to our guests, Egri. She did not appear upset. She held her offering out with the perfect self-assurance that, somehow, good manners … a sureness that if only the others would cease a moment, perhaps – must prevail. And watching her, my mother and mentor, she seemed the most preposterous of us all.

  I would run to Rat –

  And Rat’s hand took my arm. I jerked around to see. The hand – bare – moved up to my shoulder. He glanced at me, ordinary-eyed, then looked back at the Thants. His ringed hand, on the long handle of his spit, was about six inches off the place where decades of claws and fingers had worn the rough-out leather handle smooth. With no lean in it at all, his presentation stance was as absurdly awkward as his early moments with a radar-bow. I glanced at Egri again. Somehow her self-confidence and grace, coupled with his clumsiness and ignorance, put parentheses around the whole range of painful unknowing, so that again, here in my own home, I felt as alien as I ever had at any distant revel, cultures and light-years away.

  ‘Marq, this is terrible! What are they doing … !’ which was Japril at my shoulder, her new spit again extended. ‘What do you think they’re – ’

  Which is when the shadows and winds from Large Maxa’s wings beat up beside and behind me. ‘Marq –?’

  I turned.

  Max caught my shoulders in her claws. ‘Marq, please, you must – ’

  ‘What – ’

  ‘Just come. No, this is beyond all –’ and tugged me, as if I were some six-legged pup, across the floor, so that I did drop my spit. ‘Max, what …?’ I honestly thought she was talking about the Thants.

  13

  Formalities

  Once, I got in a look back. At least half our visitors were circling our oblivious guests of honour, awkward and unacknowledged offerings hanging on the ends of their long forks. The other half seemed to be standing about behind them, bewildered among the fountains and furnaces or under the cables, chains, and dangling instruments that had been summoned from floor and ceiling.