Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  Rat came behind me. Japril dashed up after him.

  ‘Outside,’ Max explained. ‘The crowds! We have to do something!’

  Kelso, V’vish, Hatti, and Jayne were waiting for us, Japril and Rat came too.

  ‘People will be crushed,’ Max went on. ‘They’re already pressed up against the walls!’

  ‘Shall we open the doors?’ Jayne demanded. ‘Perhaps that will take some of the pressure off and let the ones in front get free.’

  ‘But if the ones in back think we’ve opened Dyethshome to the public,’ Large Maxa bellowed, ‘there’ll be a surge forward – ’

  Somehow, with the private catastrophe of the Thants, we had all but lost connection to that tall, barefooted human beside me, in the rough cloth pants chained low about his hips, the thick fingers of one hand heavy with jewels, the jaw cratered with old wounds below his green, unstable eyes, about whom this public catastrophe centred.

  We moved towards the confusion of mirrors, as though by looking at the fragmented conglomerate of our own reflections we might see through to a way of ending the confusion outside.

  ‘The crowd is still growing, Marq,’ Japril whispered. ‘I just got a call from Marta, and Ynn said …’

  Then there was no hand on my shoulder, which made me look off. Korga was walking towards the transparent column by the door. He squatted before Bybe’t’s irregular black casting, the pedestal of leaves, rocks, and wings breaking about geometric uncertainties and topologic singularities, to gaze up where metres of misted crystal rose to the capital’s folds and spikes –

  Suddenly the glass glowed.

  Within, bubbles of light.

  Bubbles fell and rose.

  Rat now stood to gaze. Light lay on the floor about him, quivered on his rings, devilled his shadow’s edge behind him.

  Kal’k started forward. I pushed past Hatti to overtake her, hearing behind:

  ‘What did –?’

  ‘Did Rat turn it –?’

  ‘How –?’

  As I came up, the speaker, in the mouth of a gaping dust-skate at shin level, asked:

  ‘Who are you?’

  I had never heard my seven-times great-grandmother’s voice, but I had read enough descriptions of its velvet body, its scrap-silver nap.

  ‘You wear the rings of Vondramach Okk, and …’ In the pause, I thought perhaps Gylda Dyeth’s synapse casting had failed. But light coursed on within the irregular transparency: ‘And there are people gathered outside in numbers I have only seen the likes of during a visit from Vondramach herself. Who are you? What do you want here? Why have you wakened me?’

  I reached Rat’s side, reached up to hold Rat’s high, hard shoulder.

  ‘I am Korga, the porter, Rat. And I come from –’

  ‘Rat,’ I whispered, ‘how did you turn that on?’

  ‘– Rhyonon. But that world is now destroyed.’

  I said: ‘Rat, you’re not connected up for neural access. How did you activate that?’ Then suddenly I thought to ask: ‘Mother Dyeth, what will we do about all those people outside? They’re going to hurt themselves, if many of them haven’t already.’

  ‘And they’re here to see this one?’ my seven-times great-grandmother demanded.

  ‘As far as we can tell.’ (Japril moved up beside me.) ‘That’s certainly what it looks like.’

  ‘It happens with certain guests of honour.’ Somewhere an elderly woman sighed with resigned ire. ‘I assume, from what I see about me, that this is a formal supper and this Rat is our guest …?’

  ‘This is a formal supper,’ I said. ‘But Rat’s not the guest of honour, Mother Dyeth; only a visitor.’

  ‘Mmmmm,’ she said, which is a sound I’ve heard many humans make, but none who were born here on Velm. ‘Last time I saw folk gathered outside that way for someone who wore those rings but wasn’t the guest of honour, well … we had an unpleasantness in the north court that I hope, by now, has been forgotten. But I doubt it. So, they’re here to see this one. Have you shown this Rat fellow to them?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We haven’t.’

  ‘They’re not going to go away until you do,’ Mother Dyeth said. ‘That’s what we always did when hundreds gathered outside to see Vondramach.’

  ‘This is thousands, Mother Dyeth,’ Japril said, surprising me. ‘Do you think Rat Korga’s presence should be publicly announced?’

  ‘Hundreds? Thousands? What woman has any concept of the difference between them! But I know that if those good people don’t know for sure Rat Korga is here, rumour must be doing its damnedest.’

  ‘How do we show them?’ I asked. ‘Should we just open the doors and let people in? There’re already too many for the amphitheatre to hold. I don’t think – ’

  ‘Do it the way we did it. Activate the walls. That shouldn’t be beyond you.’

  ‘The walls …?’ One of my mothers, Kelso I think, asked behind me.

  ‘The multichrome walls. That’s what they’re there for. It’s the trouble with this heap, you know. There’re so many things it can do, nobody can keep track of them from one year to the next.’

  ‘We’ll have to look it up in the library,’ I said. ‘I’m not really sure even what you mean – ’

  ‘She means using the projection facilities in the freestanding walls,’ which was little Mima, med-tech2 and student of ancient folk theatre. ‘When the audience overflowed the amphitheatre, and they wanted to project the performances to those gathered around the house, they used the multichrome walls.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. There’re lots of things that have happened around this place in the last couple of centuries I’ve just never known about.

  ‘The last time they were used was well over a hundred years ago,’ Mima explained, ‘just before the Bazaret Troupe disbanded.’

  ‘We still have to go to the library to check the access codes. Nobody’s going to know them after this many – ’

  ‘I do,’ Mima said.

  Maybe that’s why everyone needs students.

  ‘Japril,’ I said, turning the other way, ‘you said something about public announcements?’

  Japril looked very unhappy. ‘You don’t really have much choice. Marta says that from her position the situation looks bad and Ynn says that, from where she is, it looks even worse.’

  ‘Rat, do you mind if – ’ but realized with him the question was irrelevant. ‘Mima?’

  ‘Come this way.’ She started across the floor towards the ramp. ‘To the amphitheatre. That’s where you project from.’

  ‘Come on, Rat.’

  We went over small bridges. Alsrod Thant came running up, jangling aluminium discs on chains. ‘Marq, what’s going on? I – ’ Clearwater and Eulalia were behind her. Whatever the reasons for their outrageous behaviour, they had apparently dissolved before curiosity. I wanted to say something, but Rat, Mima, and about six other women (I think Tinjo, I think Santine, among both parents and students) rushed up the ramp with us towards a lot of mirrors.

  Our images bloomed about us and fell away. As we came out from the stone arch and down the steps, somebody turned on the lights. The night sky blackened and lost stars. The high walls stood around. ‘Are you sure you know how to work the – ’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Mima said. ‘You just stand on the stage, you and Rat – just the way you did when you gave us our orientation session. Only with Rat. One moment – ’ She thought some access code over; along the stage edge tiny traps opened up to reveal black ceramic elements that I vaguely remembered having seen in pictures as a child, but (one) had never known what they were and (two) had just assumed they’d been removed.

  Empty seats rose round us in the dark to the walls themselves.

  ‘You just go out there to stage centre. Marq, maybe you could introduce Rat. Like Bazaret introducing the show.’

  ‘Huh?’ I said. ‘Oh, yeah. Sure.’ Well, isn’t that part of a diplomat’s job? ‘We’ll just stand …’ I took Rat’s arm – ‘over here?’
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  ‘The very spot from which Kand’ri herself delivered the Ambassador David’s famous seventh-act soliloquy. Oh, this is exciting!’ Mima stepped to the side of the stage. ‘You would like to see your audience, wouldn’t you? Bazaret didn’t. But Sejer’hi and Kond’ri wouldn’t perform if they couldn’t. They said that’s what made it folk theatre, you see?’

  ‘I guess so.’ I glanced up at Rat, but his eyes, hollowed in the darkness, looked out on the empty seats.

  ‘Good,’ Mima said. ‘Because that’s the only way I know how to do it.’

  ‘You’d better hurry,’ Japril said, from where she and the others had gathered behind the fountain. ‘Marta says more are coming. And Ynn – ’

  ‘All right.’ Mima closed her eyes.

  The sensation was exactly like that ambiguous up-down fall through a limen plate.

  A cloud-streaked night. I looked about. A dark rectangular plate stood behind us to the left. Another stood to the right. In front of us, or rather in front and below, there were detailed shapes, and small lights among them – and we must have been visible on the freestanding multichrome walls above Dyethshome; hopefully, the crowds moving up had now stopped their forward surge and possibly were even allowing the ones in front to move backwards a little. And I realized what Rat and I were gazing down over: the upper park levels of Morgre, their rails crowded with women, then women behind them, and behind them more, standing by the pole lights, gazing towards Dyethshome. I glanced down. Below the dark domes just at my feet (the court roofs), figures crowded the forecourt. On the rollerway up between the cactus, figures milled and pushed and jostled. I gazed down at it all from some two hundred metres; above the roofs of our cooperative, the city before us was an astonishing playroom toy.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. My voice sounded boomy and distorted. ‘I am Marq Dyeth, and this is Rat Korga, the survivor whom you have all gathered to see – no, please. Move backwards, not forwards. Those of you out around Water Alley, please move back. You are endangering the lives of those nearer Dyethshome. You can all see from where you are. Please, don’t move forward any more. This is a matter of life. If those of you there and there –’ I pointed – ‘can all move back ten steps …’

  I saw it happen; and also realized how large our image must have appeared because I saw how small their motions were.

  ‘Good. Still, if those there and there can move back, say, fifteen more steps.’

  They did it. ‘Thank you. You must start to move people away from the grounds of Dyethshome. There is still room up in the upper park level, and the view is probably better from there anyway.’ Here and there what had been a clear forward motion began to, swirl, and then reverse. ‘Thank you. Again, I want to introduce to you …’ I started to say, my friend, but thought better: ‘Rat Korga, the survivor of Rhyonon, who has come to visit our world, our city.’

  I glanced up at Rat beside me. ‘Rat, will you … uh, say something to the women here at Morgre?’

  He seemed so real beside me, gazing. I wondered if he recognized what he looked at, or the change of scale that accompanied it, or indeed if it mattered. ‘I am Rat Korga. As my friend, Marq Dyeth, said.’ The accent that in a day I had almost grown used to, now that I knew thousands heard it, seemed as intrusive as when I’d heard his first words. ‘Thank you. That is all I can say to you. I have no world, now; and its destruction hurt me in many ways. Thank you for letting me visit yours.’

  I looked about again, as Korga seemed to have said what he had to say. ‘May we ask you,’ I said, ‘to return to your living rooms. Rat Korga has been with us a day, and has already walked in our streets, moved through our runs within the city, hunted dragons on the sands outside it. But by this disruption of your own lives, by gathering to see Rat here, you only disrupt his and ours as well. I know as you go about our city, from centre to rim to centre, many of you will pass him and will extend the same courtesy to him you have extended to visitors in our clime for centuries now. Many visitors have stayed to call this, our world, home …’ I looked at Rat and wondered what I was trying to say, wondered why my single tongue stumbled now saying it. ‘The complex of flavours that awaits each of us is unique, interrupted only by sleep and ended only with death.’ It’s a hopeless cliché, and where it came from, to spring out of my mouth just then, I later wondered for hours. ‘Return to the flavours of your lives and let us again take up ours. You’ve come to see Rat Korga, and you have. Please go, now, so that we may go on. Good night.’

  As I glanced at Rat again, with his wide shoulders and hollow eyes, I saw he had raised his bare, big hand to those who stared up at us, with neither distress not humour on his long, pitted face.

  2.

  Out between low hills was the smaller more distant toy.

  ‘… I have no world, now; and its destruction hurt me in many ways. Thank you for letting me visit yours.’ Above the courts’ five domes, projected on the freestanding walls, a tall doll and a short doll stood together. ‘… the complex of flavours that awaits each of us is unique, interrupted only by sleep and ended only with …’ The comscreen, sticking above my desk’s clutter, concluded the replay Mima had thoughtfully made.

  Rat sat on my bed. ‘Why did we come here?’

  I walked across the orange carpet to the desk. ‘Formal suppers always have intermissions, where everybody retires for a while. There’re waiting-rooms for the guests to use. With all the confusion, Max and Shoshana thought this might be a good time to have it.’ I glanced at the small, planetary spheres about the suspended lamp globe. They began to circle, each with its swarm of tiny moons.

  ‘I’m still hungry,’ Rat said. ‘I didn’t eat much.’

  ‘No one ever really does at formal affairs. You just put in a lot of work doing it. But there’ll be the pickings once it’s all finished. Late-night snacks after these things are not to be believed.’ I came around the desk and leaned my hip on it. Behind Rat, fire cactus bent thick branches in a warm gust. Falling needles ticked the rail. ‘This has been quite an evening. I still don’t know what the Thants were on about. All those things they were saying – those idiotic statements – they made me feel as if I were living on some world out of history where all that we do here was against the law!’

  Rat said: ‘No, they didn’t.’

  I frowned.

  ‘They didn’t make you feel that way. That’s the way they made me feel.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

  ‘You didn’t grow up on such a world. You didn’t spend your childhood and make your transition to maturity on a world where bestiality and homosexuality were legally proscribed. So you do not possess the fund of those feelings to draw on. I do.’

  ‘But they spoke to me as much as …’ I felt confused and angry again.

  ‘They come from such a world,’ Rat said, looking down at his lap. ‘Otherwise, it would never have occurred to them to say such things.’

  ‘… but the north,’ I said. ‘In the north of this world, at least up till comparatively recently, bestiality … as you call it, was illegal.’

  ‘Before I came here, they told me as much about the north of your world as they did about the south.’ Rat’s eyes, in the lamp light, moved now to human, now to hollow (and the all-black eyes of the evelmi, in such light, frequently look hollow). ‘Is the north your world?’

  ‘More than it is yours.’

  ‘I have no world, Marq Dyeth.’

  I stepped towards him in what I thought was anger – and suddenly reeled within the combative flavours of desire. I shook my head, to see that he, standing, had stepped towards me. And knew that the desire we felt would not be consummated now. And at the same time I watched all sensations in me that were not desire fade on my tongue (metaphors of taste are so inadequate to describe what in reality is an appetite!) so that I was finally licked all round by it, till I almost fell, and would not because he did not fall.

  More fire-needles dropped. A breeze (and we were only mill
imetres apart) took the physical warmth from between us that would have done for contact.

  ‘Rat Korga?’

  It was Japril’s voice on the comscreen, and I was the one who stepped suddenly back. (It was his hand, halted under its jewelled weight, that reached forward – and, possibly because of that weight, did not quite touch me.)

  ‘Marq, I’d like to see Rat. I’m in the south court. It’s important …’

  I didn’t speak.

  But seconds later, Rat turned and walked to the metal plate in the corner of my rug.

  ‘Rat’s on his way, Japril.’

  I sat down at the desk, while Japril’s face dissolved to abstract colours. I wasn’t breathing hard; but I seemed aware of every alveolus as it filled with air to froth the bloody rush. My heart was not beating more strongly; but the slippage of muscle fibre against muscle fibre seemed to create a friction I could feel.

  ‘Marq Dyeth!’

  I sat, terribly conscious of the juncture of foot and rug, buttock and bench.

  ‘Hey – Marq?’

  I looked up, where George Thant materialized in the column, bronze, transparent, swaying in the view-light where, moments before. Rat had been.

  ‘Don’t answer me, if you want. I don’t care – ’ Her words were slurred. I wondered what she’d eaten or drunk so much of as to half-drug herself. ‘Marq, let me in – !’

  I thought through the entrance code out of habit, the way the first notes of a melody – George’s demand – produce the concluding ones without real effort. She staggered forward, then caught her balance. ‘So. This is where you run off to, hey?’

  ‘George,’ I said. ‘Look, I’m not sure what you and your folks are doing. But a lot’s been going on here that – ’

  ‘Well, we’re sure what you’ve been doing – you and your folks.’ She shook a big metallic finger at me; then the gesture lost focus, and she reached up to rub her bald, bronze head. Looking about through brazen lids, she took a few more steps. ‘Here, I’ve finally made it into one of your lizard-lover’s inner sanctums.’