Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (11 page)

‘Forty-nine times in the last two hundred eighty years,’ the human said.

‘And our years are a bit longer than Old Earth Standard,’ said the alien. ‘I was up on our moon only days ago,’ she went on, ‘when I heard that a world perhaps a third of the way around the galactic rim was just destroyed. There were hardly any survivors.’

(Look. Listen. Did you catch it? I didn’t. The reason, I suppose, is simply that I’d have thought someone in my profession
₁
would have known about that already had it really happened. But there, on alien Nepiy, I’m afraid I read it as something between a glitch in the translation and mere myth or misinformation to be expected in the general anxiety among women under such pressure.)

‘Were they with the Family or the Sygn?’ I asked; and I’m afraid I smiled when I asked. ‘Or were they just unaligned in the Web?’

‘They didn’t say,’ said the alien.

‘They didn’t say,’ said the human.

Which only confirmed my suspicion. And I thought, as I had so often on my own world: when women of different species say the same things, you are most aware of their distinctions.

An hour later I was on my shuttle flight towards Free-Kantor, listening to the thrum of ion pulsers beyond green plastic walls.

3.

Free-Kantor? In terms of light-years, it’s not so far from my home. But that doesn’t make it notable, now.

‘Free-Kantor is a world in itself,’ I’ve heard spiders say.

But it’s not a world.

At all.

One of thirty information nodes built as free data-transfer points about the more heavily inhabited parts of the galaxy, Free-Kantor began as three ice-and-iron asteroids herded together and locked in place by force fields (so quaintly called), webbed between with numerous tubes, girders, and strutwork scaffolds. One is some nineteen kilometres in diameter, another twenty-six, and the third nine.

They circle a star with no planets to speak of, and though I’ve been through it a dozen times, I’ve never managed to find out its sun’s name.

Coming into them on an ion shuttle, watching from the simulated view windows, I’ve often thought of a cluster of dyll nuts with their pitted hulls and feathery sheathing, hanging in the dark, sun-reddened on one side and webbed with sharp shadows, among which, now and again, some polished plate, catching the proper angle, flares with starlight.

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 job
₁
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 work
₂
.’

‘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 employer
₁
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 job
₁
and job
₂
. It’s just homework
₃
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 employer
₁
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?’