Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

We hung about in an invisible cloud of ships for almost four hours, waiting for a landing slot. When Kantor was built three hundred years ago, there were not yet a thousand inhabited worlds. One suspects that an odd and old argument had … well, not raged here so much as it had been mumbled and muttered over most of that time: freighter ships were just not Kantor’s first priority, so that if dispatch were needed, they could go someplace else …

  We waited.

  There are other free transfer points of course, but none of them were really any more efficient; so if I was going to wait, I might as well wait here. Myself, I’ve always suspected it was part of the general Web strategy to discourage interworld travel.

  We landed.

  Three hours later, I was sitting on a bit of frozen foam under a transparent blister, shadowed with girder work, half the night blocked out by a mini-world hanging a few kilometres above me, pricked out with lights and blacknesses, waiting for connecting passage with my home world (which ship GI said was going to be nearly twenty hours late), my thoughts not so much ahead on home as behind on Nepiy.

  I had been on Nepiy only a fraction more than a day … that is, a thirty-hour period. Chances were I would never visit it again – as I would never revisit more than a fifth the worlds my job1 took me to. A geosector of Nepiy had been ravaged by its complex misfortune (that I only knew about in a simplified version): I couldn’t have charged them full direct-line costs and full information-exchange rates, which was why I was returning home via Free-Kantor now; there are more expensive ways to travel from sun to sun, world to world, and an ID usually takes them. But after all, I’m a woman.

  The romance of a free-data node and, I suppose, the reason why I finally consented to come this way, had to do with what was Kantor’s first priority: information.

  GI on Kantor dwarfs any on any given world. To walk in the weak gravity by the great aluminium and ceramic banks in hot and cold storage is to walk past macroencyclopedias – encyclopedias of encyclopedias! I recall my first time through, when I stood on a plane of scarlet glass under an array of floating light tubes and thought out: ‘What is the exact human population of the universe?’ and was informed, for answer: ‘In a universe of c. six thousand two hundred inhabited worlds with human populations over two hundred and under five billion, “population” itself becomes a fuzzy-edged concept. Over any moment there is a birth/death pulse of almost a billion. Those worlds on which humans have the legal status of the native population and little distinction is made among all these women present statistical problems from several points of view. Thus “exactness” below five billion is not to be forthcoming. Here are some informative programs you may pursue that will allow you to ask your question in more meaningful terms …’

  Does Free-Kantor or, indeed, any free-data transfer point contain all the information in the human universe? Far from it. On such a scale, data-quantity itself is even more fuzzy-edged than population. But in the way that an urban complex soon becomes a kind of intensified sampling of the products and produce of the geosector around it, so a free-data transfer point becomes a kind of partial city against the night, an image of a city without a city’s substance, gaining what solidity it possesses from endlessly cross-filed data webs.

  On my hard foam, still puzzling over Nepiy, I’d thought to question a bit of curiosity that had tickled me since I’d left it – what, there, did that unseemly ‘he’ signify?

  On any world which took Arachnia with it from the Web for its basic tongue, language often changed and changed quickly under the pressures of a new environment. It was easy to see how, with foreign global conditions, the term might enlarge or shift its semantic category to include, say, certain postures of respect, certain social hierarchies, or even personal affection.

  I put my mental GI request for Nepiy language patterns, Arachnia, linguistic shift: What’s the special meaning of ‘he’ among the women of that part of that world?

  Surprisingly, I got the hiss of mental white noise that means – as a compensatory message confirmed seconds later – all information channels are currently in use and/or overloaded. Please, stand by.

  Well, it’s happened before. But the brainy hum that makes it too hard to think too much about anything went on, and on … and on!

  With that roar in your head, you lose concentration. I could have disconnected, of course, but that requires a complex set of access codes, one of which I wasn’t sure of anyway – you’d usually get it from GI. But I kept thinking it was going to end in another minute.

  That was the state in which, quarter of an hour later, I wandered around the black and silver partition into the sloping hall with its arched roof. Lit by small orange lights down near the floor, walls and clear roof converged in the black towards a worldlet a few kilometres off.

  Wandering over the dark rug, I realized where I was when I saw the women standing a few metres down from me in the dark. Perhaps it was because part of my mind was obliterated by the overload; perhaps it was simple curiosity:

  I wandered on.

  Both human, both female, shoulder to shoulder and with bright squares of red glass taped to their foreheads, two women strolled up to me. ‘I think that’s him …’ one announced.

  ‘Perhaps for you,’ said her friend. ‘For me, while she’s quite a pleasant looking male …’

  ‘I’m complimented.’ I smiled. I nodded. ‘But while I’m indeed male, this woman is going to refuse your proposition!’

  ‘Me? Propositioning you?’ said the first. She laughed again, a little sadly I thought, shrugged, and turned to leave.

  ‘Tell me,’ I asked the other, ‘who is that over there?’

  Faint light pulsed around an immensely fat woman in a black jumpsuit, sitting by one of the belts that lowered little trays of warm, boring food-curds down from the darkness into the fluted plastic flange on the carpet.

  ‘Ah, a sad story,’ the remaining woman said, ‘and I don’t want to tell it. Why don’t you go over and ask? I’m sure she’ll give you some information.’

  So I did. (Was it the hum in my head that made me act so strangely …?) She turned up a huge face, large pores about her nose and above thin oily eyebrows.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Eating myself to death on uncooked food,’ she whispered. In her hand, with its depressed knuckles and upper finger joints twice as thick as the next ones down, she held a paring knife, with which she seemed to conduct unheard musicians.

  ‘Oh…?’

  ‘It will take several years. I’m in charge of the whole station, you see. Its administration, that is. I stay in the pits between the worldlets. Never go down, in any of three possible directions. This is where I work2.’

  ‘And the overload …?’ I asked.

  The face was too thick to register with any precision the expression bone and muscle within pulled and pushed it towards. But I think she was surprised. ‘Overload –? What, another?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted, and wondered if my employer1 back on Nepiy had been as odd a woman of her species as this woman was of mine. ‘It’s going on right now.’ I rubbed the back of my head, as if to remove the hum.

  Perhaps she guessed what I was thinking. ‘At home, this behaviour that you no doubt find so strange would be most ordinary – even unto my protesting Its ordinariness.’ She speared something off a rising tray and nibbled at it. ‘I’m very competent at both job1 and job2. It’s just homework3 that defeats me.’

  ‘You’re not connected to GI?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, good-night, no!’ She nibbled from the knife. ‘No one is who actually works here.’

  ‘Let me have him.’ Two hands closed on my arms from behind, warm and callused. I looked at them. Large, engagingly grubby, they belonged to a smiling male, with yellow hair that lazed over forehead and ears. ‘There’s been one overload condition or another, four, five hours a day now for months. Come away to my little world to see if we can find an hour or so of pleasure for us both …?’

/>   And I thought: he’s not so bad.

  ‘Take her! Take her!’ said the obese administrator. ‘Let me get back to my debauchery.’

  I took his hand. ‘Hello. My name is Marq Dyeth.’

  ‘I’m Seven. Forty-six of us were cloned during a population drive on my home world: A to Z, AA to MM, and One to Eighteen. Would you believe, not one of us works at home any more? I’m an electrical mechanic. So were most of my sisters …’ Talkative, friendly, he took me along the dark corridor, where I glanced about at various sights within and without the transparent covering; marvels of architecture hung like some intensely alien statuary along one of my own world’s runs.

  Gravity shifted.

  Instead of bounding lightly uphill, we were leaning back against the faintest slope down (artificially maintained), till he led me off into some hangar’s gigantic workroom, hung with odd-looking torches and grapples. The smell was interesting, but sex – as it so often turns out with such folks from newly and intensively populated worlds – was a hopelessly complex affair involving so much equipment that by the time he was a-crackle with sparks from the low-amperage high-voltage electrodes that he had me play across his handsome, lithe body in its various manacles and restraints, I was more working off the overload than against it.

  All I can say is that, like some diplomat himself, he was as obliging to me as I was to him, with only one or two quizzical and good-natured inquiries, while I managed to drink his semen and induced his rectum to drink, as it were, mine – he held me with hard arms and legs and said: ‘Oh …’ And, minutes later, ‘You’re a very interesting woman.’

  ‘So are you,’ I said, though it was more camaraderie than critical judgement.

  ‘Have you ever thought how vulnerable we are here?’ she (as I could only bring myself to call her now) asked, coiling up wires and pushing machines about the partitioned flooring. ‘This isn’t a world, you know – though we all try to pretend it is. But it could go up like that –’ She touched an electrode to some metal plate, so that it sparked and snapped –‘and we’d all be gone, except the dozen or so of us who could get to the nearest ship.’ She pulled a strap of her coveralls over one hard and dirty shoulder. ‘Ten thousand people gone, like that – with only a few hundred getting out.’

  ‘Yes.’ I raised an eyebrow. (Do you see, with the frequency of such speculations why I discounted those of my employer1 on that other – what was its name? Yes, Nepiy – world?) ‘I suppose.’

  ‘And yet –’ She stood –‘we never do. Its probably because here we have no Family, no Sygn.’

  ‘You know—’ I smiled, recalling how worried the women of Nepiy and fifty other worlds had been – ‘for Cultural Fugue to take place, you have to have a culture …’

  ‘True,’ she offered.

  ‘I bet you grew up right in the middle of the Family.’

  ‘And your world was a Sygn world, wasn’t it?’

  ‘True,’ I returned. ‘At least my part of it.’ While both of us wondered how we knew, she went with me to another well-lighted corridor in the rhisome of corridors that webbed Kantor’s three little worlds. ‘Odd,’ I said as we walked, ‘but just a while ago, someone mentioned a whole world to me that recently got destroyed. Just a few women survived.’

  (You’ve been looking. You’ve been listening. No, I knew neither Korga’s name nor his world’s, yet I had heard of them, and had already passed the information on.)

  ‘Mmmm,’ said my tall mechanic, as if she’d been given something fine to eat. ‘Was it a Family world, or with the Sygn?’

  ‘They didn’t say,’ I said.

  We turned another corner.

  So she said: ‘This will take you back where you want to go.’ Then, with only the goodwill and self-confidence people can show who know for sure they are largely liked by lots of women, she said: ‘A whole world …!’ Then she made a funny little hand motion (which, I suspect, would have meant the same as if I’d shaken my head) and turned away.

  Broad, breezy, full of detours, underpasses, and overhangs, the hallways I walked back down to ground level through were an allegory of the informative complexities that Free-Kantor both was and was made for.

  And the overload hum was still going on!

  That I’ve never known to happen. Information overload in a major GI sorting system is something that’s supposed to stop after a second or two, maybe ten at the very most, certainly no more than ten minutes. This jam finally concluded with a sudden burst that brought me up short over the large red and blue plastic panels of the water fountain where I’d just bent to drink, with the declaration:

  In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, ‘she’ is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of ‘woman’. The ancient, dimorphic form ‘he’, once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of ‘she’, during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to.

  Which is to say, on Nepiy ‘he’ meant exactly what it did on my own home world or, indeed, here, at Kantor, far off it.

  But somehow during the overload, the question had become misfiled or misplaced in my own mind, so that for a moment I felt as if I were being given the answer to a perfectly irrelevant query instead of what, an hour before, I’d asked.

  The disorientation, even more than an hour of oppressive hum from the overload, completely struck me away from the feeling that, I realized as it ceased, was probably the reason why I’d come to Free-Kantor in the first place, braving all her inconveniences: here I was in the centre of the night – which now, while the water bobbled slowly over the huge, plastic sheets, changed to the conviction that, lost in darkness eternal, I was (at least for the moment) nowhere at all!

  2

  The Flower and the Web

  One of my earliest memories –

  But I must interrupt to ask: does the above disorientation and estrangement return me to this early moment in the mode of terrified retreat, or do I come to it through a broad and relaxed sense of disinterested aesthetic contrast? Both terror and aesthetics no doubt fuel memory to spear night and time to that morning thirty (standard) years before, but in what form, combination, interplay? Perhaps the answer is in the account itself. Or is it likely that women are just more complex than can be made out by starlight alone?

  – the memory: crawling the soft nursery loam between the furry bodies of my schoolmates, some of whom were beginning to get dark scales on their backs; being licked a lot and occasionally licking (though it struck me even then as silly), I wondered at all those tongues that spoke so much better than mine but said such silly things: ‘The Never will you taste like a shell or good either!’ laughter, and this is sun, and this is sand …’

  a shell, oh never! You’re not my goodness either.

  ‘A house? Never will you taste like

  Ha! Ha!...That’s called laughter, and this is sun, and this is sand…’

  A shell or good either!’

  (How many dozen evelm playwrights have used the speech of the nursery to lend poetry, poignance, and whimsy to politics and passion?) Crawl a little. Sniff a claw (or a hand); sit back and laugh. Listen. Look. Crawl. For all our world, I suppose we looked – as real adults of both species are always pointing out – like innumerable miniatures rehearsing the movements that will go into future homework3 along the corridors of some shadowed run, trough to trough, statue to statue. Finally I got to an area where a naked (like me) human (like me) male (like me) was kneeling in the dirt. Through the leaves above the nursery’s plastic roof, Iiriani light dappled the unfamiliar figures. Differences between us? Well, the child was two years or so older than I, and at that age such seems an eternity of wisdom and power. The hair was yellow and smooth. (Mine: rough and nappy, the colour of wet sand.) The face was round, with bright brown eyes
not deep at all in the friendly face. (Mine: the lightest tan, they peer from non-epicanthic caves.) As I watched, he – and I can say that honestly now – dug up handful after handful of dirt. I remember thinking how pale and strong his hands were. Perhaps six? Maybe seven? Myself, I couldn’t have been more than five.

  The child was an appalling nail-biter, which is a habit humans can have and evelmi, as far as my experience of their claws go, cannot. The dirt had darkened his knuckles and put a black line about the wrecks of those nails, harried back from the grubby crowns towards cuticles that had thickened in defence against even more gnawing. He looked up and smiled.

  I smiled back and watched, fascinated, while he patted and pawed the hulk of some marvellous sand castle to shape. At that age, I did not know that at one time perhaps a fifth of the human race had such pale skins and such coloured and textured hair – and were called caucasian, nor that over the six thousand worlds today well over half have such marvellous eyes as his, once called mongolian. The other children, some human, some evelm, whispered and gambolled around us …

  Sometimes I think I watched him only a moment; sometimes I think I stared at him an age.

  Then: a black claw descended, like the huge limb of some mechanized sculpture falling into activity.

  The youngster looked up to grin at some hovering parent (like mine): rough and grainy where they emerged from the bark-black hide, becoming metal smooth as they curved to needle tips, iron-coloured talons spoke only to me of distance but not of specific origin.

  The child reached up.

  Claw and hand grappled –

  I couldn’t have watched that juncture more than a moment. Even then I knew the tussle of a parent picking up a child to go off somewhere into the city – home, for me.

  But for him? Really, then, I knew little of two kinds of flesh joined there, or of the disparate organic body chemistries that, some places on my world, sunder the species and at others are the parameters about which everything that is human and everything that is evelm are in play.