Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  And Rat was right. As an insult it only seemed odd.

  ‘Now what do I find? That your world’s just the same as mine!’ She looked around again. ‘This is no different from my room, a sun and a world and sixty-eight thousand light-years away. Not a puff of difference.’ She came up to the desk. ‘Did you know that? There, in the cells of 17, cut into our canyon walls – you call yours Dyethshome, we call ours Thantspace – my living room is just like yours. Here – ’ I a crisp motion belying whatever drug her staggering had mimed, she grasped my desk edge, pulled out the small control drawer from under the lip, and reached inside. ‘I’ll show you!’

  ‘George,’ I said, ‘what are you –?’

  George twisted things inside, knocked others with her knuckles, flattened still more under her polished palm.

  ‘George, what in the –?’

  Stars and clouds went out.

  The hills, with Morgre between, vanished. George laughed. Fire cactus faded. Somewhere the stream ceased to plash. Bed and desk and rail and carpet disappeared.

  Three metres by three metres, my living room’s wall plates had once been sprayed, probably back in Ari’s time, with a translucent green gum that had now worn off the centre of the floor, showing tarnished blotches. Where the metal bolt-heads were deeply inset, some of the coating had pulled loose, though after a century it still accomplished its major job: to keep any random chemical reaction in the walls’ surface from adding some upsetting order to the image the plates could be excited to project.

  George, no longer bronze and not quite as tall, stood by the control post that slanted up, off centre, in the pentagonal floor. ‘Same technology. Same everything … Not a bit different from mine.’

  I uncrossed my legs, feeling warm metal uncomfortable under my buttocks, and started to stand – even three years ago I could still get up from a cross-legged position on the floor in a single motion. But now I had to push myself up to my knees, roll around a little, and then get one foot under me, shove, and then another. ‘George,’ I said. ‘You are rude beyond bearing – which is no news. But this takes all!’

  George was looking at her arm, thinner than it had been. Above her elbow was a small sore. ‘That’s not supposed to be there, she said. ‘At least not now. Oh, this is crazy … !’

  Projection lenses lost their glow and retracted into the ceiling. Two metal doors clicked closed over them. (Three others did not, which meant some of the backup circuits were no longer working. But the room was overdetermined by a factor of seven, which meant maybe my great-great-great-granddaughter might have to have one or two repairs done before she moved in.) ‘I don’t know …’ George shook her head, where, without the projection, there was at least three weeks’ growth of hair. ‘But – well, I guess …’ She looked at the green, irregularly shaped walls. ‘No, it’s not that much like mine, really. Mine’s cubical – and the realspace must be half again the size of this. I bet some sociometrician could make a good argument that’s why I have my personality and you have yours.’ Teeth together, lips pulled back, she rubbed one thick thumb over that sore. ‘Shit …’

  ‘Get out of here,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but at this point I don’t want to know!’

  ‘You don’t?’ George looked up, glowering. ‘Nea tells you that we’re trying to take over the position of Focus Unit on Nepiy; you report our takeover to the Web; we come to confront you and receive your accusation directly – tonight the place is crawling with Web officials! Now you claim you “don’t know what we’re doing”? I said no, that’s not the Dyeths’ style. But Thadeus said: “You just watch! We’ll go there, try to make an honourable showing. Will they say a thing? They’ll have the odd Web officer just standing around, as if they just happened to be invited for some other purpose entirely. Chances are, they won’t even have told her yet. They’ll tell her after we go. They think that’s stylish.” Well, we’re leaving your stylish, decadent, beastly little world. And when we leave, we’re going to Nepiy. And we’re going to take it over. And neither you nor the Web can stop us.’

  ‘George,’ I said. ‘I’ve been a little confused up till now. But you’ve just taken that confusion into another realm entirely. What are you talking about?’

  But George was fingering her sore again. ‘The medical program gave me a point-three chance that it was bacterial and a one-point-six chance that it was viral, both of which go up by a factor of two-point-eight if it lasts more than four days. It’s going to be four days tomorrow. I don’t want to be sick. I was sick last year, for two whole weeks, and it was the scariest thing that ever happened to me. Oh, shit …’

  ‘George,’ I said.

  ‘Well, Thadeus is right.’ She looked up. ‘I said, “no.” Alsrod said, “no.” And Alsrod is pretty smart, and I always listen to what she’s got to say. But Thadeus has the experience and knows what to expect. Ordering experience is what a Family’s all about, you know? And we’re a Family, now. But don’t worry: we have our own ways of getting what we want, spiders or no spiders. That’s why we can go to Nepiy and still be who we are. We take our history with us.’ She looked around, frowning. ‘Though this has been the most unpleasant experience of my life – imagine, you, betraying us to the spiders! But what could you expect from you lizard-loving perverts!’

  ‘Betrayed you to –?’

  George pulled her brown hand from the control post’s control plate – and grew large and bronze, while the green walls grew distances and stars and night and hills and railings and carpet and desk. She removed her hand from the drawer; and slid it closed. I sat down in the chair that, behind my desk, had once more moulded to my shape.

  As I moved my bare feet over the rug’s orange nap, bronze George stepped back on to the limen plate, laughing.

  Light rose around her. George and her laughter faded.

  More fire-needles fell.

  All I could think was: Would hotwind season arrive early this year?

  I know how much of my world – its streets, its hills, its runs, its rains, the halls, the heat, the sky, the stars, the stream itself – is and is not illusion. But for a moment, as I sat by my desk, still lost in the disruption from George’s invasion, I felt foreign as a creature from one of those primitive geosectors on some world where all reproductive media are safely contained in clearly visible frames, who, for the first time, confronts a modern society where all is what we once called – to use a word that in one ancient human language or another referred to vision but here on Velm had shifted to denote taste – spectacle.

  Then, beyond the rail, a rustle of leaves, needles, wings.

  ‘Marq …’

  I looked up from the wrinkled covers on my bed.

  ‘Marq?’

  I blinked at the railing around my room. The shapes and objects beyond it came into night focus.

  ‘Marq …!’

  A dark forehead’s wide scales beneath gorgeous gills: Sel’v walked up over fallen needles towards my platform. I saw her face above the floor boards and below the lower rail-rung. The line of light moved down her neck, and I saw Small Maxa, thin and white, beside her. Sel’v’s wings sculled on the dark, and Maxa scooted ahead to the platform edge. ‘Go on, go on, go on …’ Sel’v said with several tongues. Then my mother leapt, momentarily to perch on the rail, beating up tape and clutter to balance. Then down to the carpet, glancing back. ‘Hurry up, now, dear. Tell Marq what you told me.’

  For a moment Maxa stood, grasping her thin elbow with the knuckly fingers of her other hand. Then she grasped the platform edge, vaulted up and hunkered under the railing to stand at our mother’s hinder haunch, blinking creamy eyes.

  I frowned. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Marq …’ Maxa’s hair was a rough, white cloud. ‘Marq, Rat’s gone.’

  My fist, among dice and tape, opened on the desk’s varnished pith. ‘What?’

  ‘Rat,’ she said. ‘Rat left. With that woman, the one from the Web.’

  ‘W
ith Japril,’ I said. ‘Yes, I …’

  Maxa looked up at Sel’v and a jaw muscle bunched.

  Sel’v lifted her foreclaws, swung her head from side to side, and said: ‘Go on, dear. Tell Marq everything.’

  ‘Rat Korga, your new friend,’ Maxa said, ‘the survivor of Rhyonon …’ Her voice was so low she only seemed to talk with half the tongue she had. ‘Rat was leaving with that Web woman. I met them outside on the terrace. The dark erased his eyes, Marq. I asked them where they were going – you know, Rat went with me to look at my mines this morning in the playroom.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Rat didn’t say anything,’ Maxa said. ‘Only looked at me. And because of that look, I came to tell you.’

  ‘Sel’v?’ I stood up. ‘Maxa – this whole day has been full of people telling me things I don’t seem to be able to understand.’

  ‘Tell Marq what she said,’ Sel’v prompted, ‘what the spider said.’

  ‘What did Japril say?’

  ‘She said they were leaving this world for ever. She said they were leaving Velm. She said that this world would not do for Rat. She said that she was sorry. And she said that I should relate this to you. But it was because of Rat’s look, Marq, that I – ’

  I don’t remember lunging across the carpet. I don’t remember grasping her shoulders. I know she screamed. And I know it was not because she felt my hands on her flesh – it was only another photocall. We were not near enough to the wall for the connection to be that good. Still, the notion that I might even mime such a violation brought her to writhing sobs.

  She turned her white hair aside, now left, now right. ‘Oh, Marq! Marq …!’

  Crying, she looked up at me. Spittle on her chin had streaked the dust from the mine-clays that always greyed her face. There were tears on her cheek. Beside us, Sel’v had risen to her hind feet, to claw the air with four claws, her wings unfurled, making their own hurricane about my dwelling with her own distress.

  ‘Marq … !’

  ‘Marq … !’

  ‘Marq … !’

  I pushed myself away and lurched, unsteady as George, for the limen plate.

  3.

  Dark enough to strike the Rat’s eyes’ glass.

  A dozen women still stood or squatted, on two feet, four, or six, about the coloured clays before the terrace. A few waited by the pool (I recognized the two hunting scooters, parked by the black and silver wall, showing no trace of the thousands that had milled around them only an hour ago), the same number now who might have gathered to see guests arrive and depart at any formal supper.

  But because, with Rat, I had watched the crowds begin dispersing when we had hovered above them on the freestanding multichromes, I had somehow carried through that dispersal, in my mind, to completion:

  The remaining women surprised me.

  Had they watched, with Small Maxa, Rat and Japril leave?

  Angered, I turned to re-enter Dyethshome, and saw my face break up on a hundred mirrors.

  At the column, Large Maxa stood, her foreclaws against the crystal, her midclaws just off the floor, her wings loose about her on the floor in folds of scarlet and dark green. She played one tongue and another on the glass surface, entranced with this one sculpture which, for so long now, we had all but ignored. I started to go past. My mother’s aesthetic interest seemed the most experienced and useless of things, and I wanted to be away from it.

  But, bubbling, light still lived and rose inside it.

  I frowned, looked back, turned back.

  Without ceasing her appreciation of the sculptural marvel, Large Maxa looked at me with eyes whose blackness recalled his: she must have seen, with hers, even in her half-hypnotized state, my despair. She turned her great head to continue her examination of the column and to cut short, as one can only with members of one’s own stream, the necessity for greeting.

  ‘Mother Dyeth …?’ I said.

  ‘Mmm,’ said the pillar’s brassy contralto. (Large Maxa’s wings rippled on the floor, but that was the only notice she gave of the vibrations that inscribed themselves across her study and pleasure.) ‘I’ve been playing through the research channels in the library. Someone was thoughtful enough to connect me up to those permanently when I was built. So: you’re one of my seven-times great-grand-offspring. Marq Dyeth, it’s nice to know you.’

  I couldn’t very well interrupt Maxa to ask; no doubt we were interrupting her enough by my childish curiosity in this synaptic image of my human forebear. ‘Mother Dyeth,’ I said, ‘where is everybody?’

  ‘Gone home, back to their respective rooms, their respective worlds. From what I gather, this hasn’t been the most successful of parties.’

  ‘The Thants …?’

  ‘Your offworld guests of honour?’ Her voice, by silence, projected the disapproval that a human face would sign by a slight lowering and an evelm face by a slight raising. (Large Maxa’s head, still licking, still without looking, raised; and I wondered what my grandmother made of my mother who tasted and tasted her gleaming flank.) ‘No, they were the first to leave. They’re not very friendly. I like you, boy. From what I overheard, you love the tall human with the rings. Yes? You remind me of me – and of my children. Are you old enough to remember my boy, Vrach? Vrach, with a lover, Orgik Korm, took this stream on into its second ripple, you know. I must say, the place looked very different back then. Not better, mind you. Just different.’

  ‘I’ve heard of them,’ I said. ‘But they died a hundred, a hundred-fifty years ago, grandmother.’

  ‘Of course.’ There was laughter, ending in a sigh. (Max’s wings whispered.) ‘I’m tired now. Do me a favour there, Marq. Turn me off.’

  ‘Mother Dyeth,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know how.’

  I read a human frown in that absent voice.

  ‘Don’t know how? Oh, well.’ The sign that came next revised that frown’s meaning: ‘Well. Well, well.’

  ‘How did Rat turn you on?’

  She was a book, she was a text, she was a set of signs, some present, some absent but implied, and many just forgotten, to be interpreted like the interminable crystals I had been trying to read since adolescence. She was a hermeneutic enterprise I could not bear, who mocked me by the miming of a desire stronger than mine to withdraw from the encounter. ‘No, don’t go yet, Marq.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘I can go look up the access numbers –’

  ‘It’s not necessary.’

  ‘You know, Mother Dyeth –’ It seemed the diplomatic thing to say – ‘I’m reading your memoirs. Really, I’ve thought about you on and off all my life.’

  ‘On and off,’ she said. ‘On and off. When I was alive, there were lots of worlds with switches that you actually had to do something to in order to activate. I guess they’re being phased out – at least here.’

  I started to say something. Then I frowned. ‘How did Rat turn you on?’

  ‘I was constructed,’ Mother Dyeth confided, ‘so that anyone who wore those rings could activate or deactivate me.’

  ‘Some information the rings contain?’ I asked. ‘The rings of Vondramach?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Actually, no.’

  ‘Is it information you can give me? Can you tell me how?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  The voice became breathy, boomy, and I wondered if the synapse caster had erred, though the voice’s intention was clear. From an evelm tongue it would have been a whisper, though it filled the whole dim waterless court. (Someone – Egri? Maxa? – had turned off the spill.) ‘Look down at the pedestal just about level with the thickest part of your calf. You will see there some metal leaves. Just below them and to the left, you will find a small, black button.’ I heard the sound of a deep and resigned breath. ‘Take your finger, and press it.’

  There were the dyll leaves, sculpted centuries ago by Bybe’t. I stooped. Under them, in the shadow of Large Maxa?
??s loose wing, was a small black protuberance. In thirty-six years, child and adult, I’d never seen it.

  Mechanical switches are less common than in my seven-times great-grandmother’s day. Still, I wondered which finger I should use. There are cultures where, depending on what you want to accomplish, it matters. Finally, however, with a forefinger, I jabbed.

  Above the fluted pedestal, light died.

  There was only the sound of delicate wet tongues peeling and peeling from glass.

  It might as well have been silence; and unlike the silences that had interrupted the voice till now, no new words would come to enclose it, and thus inform it with meaning.

  I stood, as Maxa moved further around the column, to taste other irregularities in the darkened crystal, dragging brilliant wings.

  Walking back across the small bridges above dry carvings, I saw Egri come up the spiral stair, among the silver stars of Mu-3. She looked about. But the dining apparatus had all been retracted into floors and ceilings. She walked to the perch and climbed, tiredly, from one inlaid shelf to the other, finally to sit, one leg up and one hanging, blinking about the court. I walked up the ramp.

  I had seen those mirrors so many times I missed my multiplication as I came out under guanoed stone to step down stone steps.

  The amphitheatre lights were still on.

  ‘Sklenu Marq …?’

  Cross-legged at the centre of the skene, JoBonnot turned herself around on red-gloved hands to look up at me.

  ‘Ah, yes. So. You are a fool, poor Squellem Dyeth.’

  ‘JoBonnot –’ I stepped over the grill – ‘where are they?’

  About the amphitheatre, students sat here and there, whispering to one another, walking about in the aisles, oblivious to everything and anything that might have been going on on that bright stage.

  ‘In fact –’ JoBonnot leaned her masked head to the side – ‘as far as your GI can tell me, there are no words in the four major language groups that humans and evelmi share in this world to designate precisely the kind of fool you are.’