Katin frowned. “Then what are we doing here? What happened then?”
“We stayed out by the manned stations and watched the fireworks from a safe distance. It took a little over three hours to reach peak intensity. We were talking with the Alkane’s crew when we got the captain’s signal from The Black Cockatoo. So we scooted on around, picked him up, and let all the Cockatoo’s cyborg studs loose.”
“Picked him up! You mean he did get out?”
“Yeah. He’s in another room. He wants to talk to you.”
“He wasn’t fooling us about ships going into a nova and coming out the other side?” They started toward the door.
Outside they walked down a corridor with a glass wall that looked across broken moon. Katin had lost himself in marvelous contemplation of the rubble when the Mouse said, “Here.”
They opened a door.
A crack of light struck in across Lorq’s face. “Who’s there?”
Katin asked, “Captain?”
“What?”
“Captain Von Ray?”
“… Katin?” His fingers clawed the chair arms. Yellow eyes stared, jumped; jumped, stared.
“Captain, what …?” Katin’s face furrowed. He fought down panic, forced his face to relax.
“I told Mouse to bring you to see me when you were up and around. You’re … you’re all right. Good.” Agony spread the ruptured flesh, then faltered. And for a moment there was agony.
Katin stopped breathing.
“You tried to look too. I’m glad. I always thought you would be the one to understand.”
“You … fell into the sun, Captain?”
Lorq nodded.
“But how did you get out?”
Lorq pressed his head against the back of the chair. Dark skin, red hair shot with yellow, his unfocused eyes, were the only colors in the room. “What? You’re going to have to speak louder when you talk to me. Otherwise … Get out, you say?” He laughed sharply. “It’s an open secret now. How did I get out?” A muscle quivered on the wrack of his jaw. “A sun—” Lorq held up one hand, the fingers curved to support an imaginary sphere “—it rotates, like a world, like some moons. With something the mass of a star, rotation means incredible centripetal force pushing out at the equator. At the end of the buildup of heavy materials at the surface, when the star actually novas, it falls inward toward the center.” His fingers began to quiver. “Because of the rotation, the material at the poles falls faster than the material at the equator.” He clutched the arm of the chair again. “Within seconds after the nova begins you don’t have a sphere anymore, but a …”
“A torus!”
Lines scored Lorq’s face. And his head jerked to the side, as if trying to avoid a great light. Then the scarred lineaments came back to face them. “Did you say torus? A torus? Yes. That sun became a doughnut with a hole big enough for two Jupiters to fit through, side by side.”
“But the Alkane’s been studying novas up close for nearly a century! Why didn’t they know?”
“The matter displacement is all toward the center of the sun. The energy displacement is all outwards. The gravity shift will funnel everything toward the hole; the energy displacement keeps the temperature as cool inside the hole as the surface of some red giant star—well under five hundred degrees.”
Though the room was cool, Katin saw sweat starting in the ridges of Lorq’s forehead.
“The topological extension of a torus of that dimension—the corona which is all the Alkane’s stations can see—is almost identical to a sphere. Large as the hole is, compared to the size of the energy-ball, that hole would be pretty hard to find unless you knew where it was—or fell into it by accident.” On the chair arm the fingers suddenly stretched, quivered. “The Illyrion—”
“You … you got your Illyrion, Captain?”
Again Lorq raised his hand before his face, this time in a fist. He tried to focus on it. With his other hand he grabbed for it, half missed, grabbed again, missed completely, then again; opened fingers grappled the closed ones. The doubled fist shook as with palsy.
“Seven tons! The only materials dense enough to center in the hole are the trans-three-hundred elements—not the Schwarzschild object that more than a millennium of quantum mathematics would have predicted. But Illyrion! It floats free there, for whoever wants to go in and sweep it up. Fly your ship in, then look around to see where it is, and sweep it up with your projector vanes. It collects on the nodes of your projectors. Illyrion—nearly free of impurities.” His hands came apart. “Just … go on sensory input, and look around to see where it is.” He lowered his face. “She lay there, her face … her face an amazing ruin in the center of hell. And I swept my seven arms across the blinding day to catch the bits of hell that floated by—” He raised his head again. “There’s an Illyrion mine down on New Brazillia …” Outside the window a mottled planet hung huge in the sky. “They have equipment here for handling Illyrion shipments. But you should have seen their faces when we brought in our seven tons, hey, Mouse?” He laughed loudly again. “That’s right, Mouse? You told me what they looked like, yes? … Mouse?”
“That’s right, Captain.”
Lorq nodded, breathed deep. “Katin, Mouse, your job is over. You’ve got your walking papers. Ships leave here regularly. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting on another one.”
“Captain,” Katin ventured, “what are you going to do?”
“On New Brazillia, there’s a home where I spent much pleasant time when I was a boy. I’m going back there … to wait.”
“Isn’t there something you could do, Captain? I looked and—”
“What? Speak louder.”
“I said, I’m all right, and I looked—!” Katin’s voice broke.
“You looked going away. I looked searching the center. The neural distortion is all the way up into the brain. Neurocongruency.” He shook his head. “Mouse, Katin, Ashton Clark to you.”
“But Captain—”
“Ashton Clark.”
Katin looked at the Mouse, then back at the captain. The Mouse fiddled with the strap of his sack. Then he looked up. After a moment they turned and left the lightless room.
Outside they once more gazed across the moonscape.
“So,” Katin mused. “Von Ray has it and Prince and Ruby don’t.”
“They’re dead,” the Mouse told him. “Captain said he killed them.”
“Oh.” Katin looked out on the moonscape. After a while he said: “Seven tons of Illyrion, and the balance begins to shift. Draco is setting as the Pleiades rises. The Outer Colonies are going to go through some changes. Bless Ashton Clark that labor relocation isn’t too difficult today. Still, there are going to be problems. Where’re Lynceos and Idas?”
“They’ve already gone. They got a stellar-gram from their brother and they’ve gone to see him, since they were here in the Outer Colonies.”
“Tobias?”
“That’s right.”
“Poor twins. Poor triplets. When this Illyrion gets out and the change begins …” Katin snapped his fingers. “No more bliss.” He looked up at the sky, nearly bare of stars. “We’re at a moment of history, Mouse.”
The Mouse scraped wax from his ear with his little fingernail. His earring glittered. “Yeah. I was thinking that myself.”
“What are you going to do now?”
The Mouse shrugged. “I really don’t know. So I asked Tyÿ to give me a Tarot reading.”
Katin raised his eyebrows.
“She and Sebastian are downstairs now. Their pets got loose around the bar. Scared everybody half to death and almost broke up the place.” The Mouse laughed harshly. “You should have seen it. Soon as they get finished calming down the owner, they’re coming up to read my cards. I’ll probably get another job studding. There’s not much reason to think about the mines now.” His fingers closed on the leather sack under his arm. “There’s still a lot to see, a lot I have to play. Maybe you and me can sti
ck together awhile, get on the same ship. You’re funny as hell sometimes. But I don’t dislike you half as much as I dislike a lot of other people. What are your plans?”
“I haven’t really had time to think about them.” He slipped his hands beneath his belt and lowered his head.
“What are you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“What?”
“That here I am on a perfectly good moon; I’ve just finished up a job, so I won’t have any worries for a while. Why not sit down and get some serious work done on my novel?” He looked up. “But you know, Mouse? I don’t really know if I want to write a book now.”
“Huh?”
“When I was looking at that nova … no, after it, just before I woke and thought I’d have to spend the rest of my life in blinkers, ear and nose plugs, while I went noisily nuts, I realized how much I hadn’t looked at, how much I hadn’t listened to, smelled, tasted—how little I knew of those basics of life you have literally at your fingertips. And then Captain—”
“Hell,” the Mouse said. With his bare foot he toed dust from his boot. “You’re not going to write it, after all the work you’ve already done?”
“Mouse, I’d like to. But I still don’t have a subject. And I’ve only just gotten prepared to go out and find one. Right now I’m just a bright guy with a lot to say and nothing to say it about.”
“That’s a fink-out,” the Mouse grunted. “What about the captain and the Roc? And you said you wanted to write about me. Okay, go ahead. And write about you too. Write about the twins. You really think they’d sue you? They’d be tickled pink, both of them. I want you to write it, Katin. I might not be able to read it, but I’d sure listen if you read it to me.”
“You would?”
“Sure. After all you’ve put into it this far, if you stopped now, you wouldn’t be happy at all.”
“Mouse, you tempt me. I’ve wanted to do nothing else for years.” Then Katin laughed. “No, Mouse. I’m too much the thinker still. This last voyage of the Roc? I’m too aware of all the archetypical patterns it follows. I can see myself now, turning it into some allegorical Grail quest. That’s the only way I could deal with it, hiding all sorts of mystic symbolism in it. Remember all those writers who died before they finished their Grail recountings?”
“Aw, Katin, that’s a lot of nonsense. You’ve got to write it!”
“Nonsense like the Tarot? No, Mouse. I’d fear for my life with such an undertaking.” Again he looked over the landscape. The moon, so known to him, for a moment put him at peace with all the unknown beyond. “I want to. I really do. But I’d be fighting a dozen jinxes from the start, Mouse. Maybe I could. But I don’t think so. The only way to protect myself from the jinx, I guess, would be to abandon it before I finished the last
—Athens, March 1966
New York, May 1967
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE AUTHOR GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES the invaluable aid of Helen Adam and Russell FitzGerald with problems of Grail and Tarot lore. Without their help NOVA would cast a much dimmer light.
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
For
Frank Romeo
Contents
Prologue: A World Apart
Monologues: Visible and Invisible Persons Distributed in Space
One: From Nepiy to Free-Kantor
1
2
3
Two: The Flower and the Web
1
2
3
4
5
Three: Visitors on Velm
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Four: Rescue on Rhyonon
1
2
3
Five: Rescue Continued
1
2
Six: Rescue Concluded
1
2
3
Seven: Home and a Stranger
1
2
3
4
5
Eight: Strangers and Visitors
1
2
3
4
5
6
Nine: From Breakfast to Morning
1
2
3
4
5
Ten: A Dragon Hunt
1
2
3
Eleven: A Tale of Two Suppers
1
2
3
4
Twelve: Return to Dyethshome
1
2
3
4
5
6
Thirteen: Formalities
1
2
3
Epilogue: Morning
A Biography of Samuel R. Delany
WRITER’S NOTE
Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand is the first novel in an SF diptych. The second novel in the diptych is The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities.
—Samuel R. Delany
PROLOGUE
A World Apart
“OF COURSE,” THEY TOLD him in all honesty, “you will be a slave.”
His big-pored forehead wrinkled, his heavy lips opened (the flesh around his green, green eyes stayed exactly the same), the ideogram of incomprehension among whose radicals you could read ignorance’s determinant past, information’s present impossibility, speculation’s denied future.
“But you will be happy,” the man in the wire-filament mask went on from the well in the circle desk. “Certainly you will be happier than you are.” The features moved behind pink and green plastic lozenges a-shake on shaking wires. “I mean, look at you, boy. You’re ugly as mud and tall enough to scare children in the street. The prenatal brain damage, small as it is, we still can’t correct. You’ve been in trouble of one sort or another for as long as there are records on you: orphanages, foster homes, youth rehabilitation camps, adult detention units—and you haven’t gotten along in any of them. Sexually …?” Lozenge tinkled against lozenge: the man’s head shook. “In this part of the world your preferences in that area can’t have done you any good. You’re a burden to yourself, to your city, to your geosector.” Lozenges lowered, just a bit: the man moved forward in his seat. “But we can change all that.”
He pushed back in the sling that was uncomfortable and costly. A blank and intricate absence on his face, he raised one big-knuckled hand to point with a finger thick as a broom-handle—for the technology of that world still made lathes, lasers, bombs, and brooms: the nail was gnawed almost off it, as were the nails on his other fingers and thumbs. Crowding his wide palms’ edge, whether flailing before him or loose in his lap, those fingers seemed not only too rough and too heavy for any gentle gesture, but also—though, if you counted, there were only ten—too many. The finger (not the fore- but the middle) jabbed brutally, futilely. “You can change me?” The voice in his nineteen-year-old throat was harsh as some fifty-year-old derelict’s. “You can make me like you? Go on! Make me so I can understand things and numbers and reading and stuff!” As brutally, the finger came back against the horse-boned jaw: a mutated herpes virus, along with some sex-linked genetic anomaly, had, until three years ago when the proper phage was developed, rendered the ordinary adolescent acne in the urban males of that world’s lower latitudes a red, pitted disaster. “All right, change me! Make me like you!”
Either side of a plastic diamond, the mouth’s corners rose. “We could.” The plastic swung with breath. “But if we did, then you wouldn’t really be you anymore, now, would you?” From the black ceiling, through the orrery of masking bits, a hanging lamp dappled the man’s naked arms. “We’re going to make a change in your mind—a change in your brain—a very small change, a change much smaller than the one you just asked for. We’re going to take that little knot of anger
you just waved at me on the end of your finger, that anger you just threw back at your own face—we’re going to take that knot, and we’re going to untie it. Maybe thirty brain cells will die by the time we’re finished. Maybe six thousand synapses will be shorted open and left that way. Maybe another thousand will be permanently closed. The illegal drugs we know you’ve put in your belly and your lungs and your veins over the past twelve months, not to mention the past twelve years, have already wreaked more biological havoc among your basic ten billion than we will, by a factor of several hundred thousand. Indeed, a side effect of what we intend to do is that you simply won’t want any more drugs. You’ll be happy with who you are and with the tasks the world sets you. And you must admit that, as worlds go, this is a pretty beneficent one.”
He didn’t know what “beneficent” meant. And though he’d heard that there were other cities (other than the three in whose slums and institutions he’d grown up), other counties, other geosectors, even other worlds with beings who were just not human, it all struck him as only dubiously credible.
Behind the mask with its plastic shapes a-bob, the man was saying: “It’s a decision many men, not to say women, make … Indeed, I read a report last week that said almost three times as many women as men on our world make this decision, though it doesn’t seem my experience. The men—and women—who’ve made the decision we’re asking of you include some fine folks, too: artists, scientists, politicians, well-respected philosophical thinkers. Some very rich and powerful people have decided to abandon their worldly acquisitions and come to the Institute here. They feel, I suppose, we have something to teach them. And though we certainly would never claim such a thing—our method is much too simple—perhaps we do.”
“I can learn things,” he suggested hoarsely, pulling back in the sling and looking down; for the tests he’d been given over the years suggested strongly that he couldn’t. And the few times he’d hung around the places that were a confusion of books and tapes and films, they’d asked him to leave, or put him out, saying much what this masked man was saying now and saying it much more angrily. “I could learn if you taught me …”