Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (15 page)

Clym said: ‘None of us knows anything about the survivor.’

‘
The
…?’ I said ‘There’s
only
one?’ (Look. Listen …)

‘If there’s one or a hundred, we don’t know anything
about her – or them. And yet, notice how we go on talking as if there were, as if there had to be.’

‘But to imagine the population of a
world
completely de –’

‘Exciting, isn’t it?’ Clym’s hand suddenly came forward to touch my neck. His voice dropped. ‘Within seventy-two hours, my friend, if we still know each other, I am going to take you by force, chain you in a special chamber I have already equipped for the purpose, and do some very painful things to your body that will possibly – the chances are four out of five – result in your death, and certainly in your permanent disfigurement, mental and physical.’ (We live in a medically sophisticated age. You have to work very hard to permanently disfigure any body.) ‘I’ve done some checking on you and found that you are a strange human being – at least to me: your sexual predilections run towards only one gender, and only of a few species. You make distinctions between pain and pleasure that are both baffling to me yet highly interesting to contemplate violating. You’ve informed me of the nature of your desire for me. It is only fair, I feel, to inform you of the nature of mine towards you. You are, of course, free to absent yourself from my company. But if you do not, what I speak of
will
happen … though another woman, male or female, or any of several species of plants will replace you if you decide to leave. These are distinctions you make in your desire and pursuit of the whole that I, fortunately, am not encumbered with. Do you understand?’

‘Just tell me,’ I said, my throat dry, suddenly and uncomfortably so, ‘is this part of your job
₁
or just your way of being friendly?’

‘Though my sexuality is not part of my psychosis, they have been integrated carefully by some very clever people.’ She moved one and another finger (and from
then on, ‘she’ was the only way I could think of her) against my carotid. ‘As of now, the distinction between work and pleasure is one I do not make.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

5.

We got back to the conference with no further breach of politesse, at least as far as I could tell. I asked for an immediate transfer to another section of the seminar, meeting some sixty million kilometres away. Minutes later in my room, my callbox beeped approval.

As I was hurrying down the hall to catch my shuttle boat, a tall figure, suited from feet to face in scarlet, ran up to me. ‘Skri Marq …?’ She made a few wriggling motions and scarlet fell away from her black cap, her silver-shot eyes (contact lenses? corneal tattoos?), her neck, her shoulders. Scarlet peeled from breasts, arms, sides, and belly, to float out about her waist like a bloody crenna. ‘Skri Marq, have you seen Skina Clym?’ I didn’t recognize the particular honorifics. Worlds that have them, have them by the dozens. But whenever you come to an official Web function, there’s usually a note somewhere among the cards, tapes, and fiche-crystals they present you with as you arrive asking you, please, while in Web territory, not to employ them at all. ‘I really must find Skon Clym. She’s such a fascinating woman. I
am
totally fascinated by her, you know. I only hope she is as fascinated with me.’ She dropped her head fondly – and a bit quizzically – to the side.

As red petals began to close about her, I suddenly touched her arm. ‘I’m sure you will. But you
must
ask her to be
very
clear about her intentions towards you. Remember that. It’s very important.’

‘Oh, Skyla Marq!’ (Apparently my status had changed; perhaps after one has answered a question …?) ‘Do you think …
he
really might … that someone like Skoi Clym might even …!’ And the star-flung night alone (and maybe a population of sixty or seventy million) knows what a
Skoi
might be. ‘This whole experience here, in the Web, has been so thrilling, so expansive, so growth-provoking!’ Her filigreed eyes widened above an open smile. ‘And, by ancient Eurd, to think that someone like Skyotchet Clym might even be interested in …’ Red sealed in it and her cyhnk.

‘No one likes advice. Still, remember mine. Please.’ I suppose I had been overcome with an image of the naïve worldling, lost among such intrigues as bloom and blossom in the Web. Clearly she’d been displaying every emblem she could think of to impress the spiders at their spinning, while understanding none of those emblems’ import. ‘Take care of yourself now. Take very serious care. But now you must excuse me.’ Then I went sixty million kilometres away.

And wished it were sixty million light-years and in another sunsystem.

The weeks passed. The seminar ended. Then light-years, finally, obliterated mere interplanetary distance.

What can I say?

Things like that happen in my profession
₁
. I don’t mean worlds getting destroyed. I mean encounters with the odd creations of our epoch, like Clym. I know about security reclassifications. If I couldn’t check out General Info about Rhyonon, then there was nothing to do but put it out of my mind – sort of.

Which is what – sort of – I did.

Until I got home.

Home?

It’s the place you can never visit for the first time, because by the time it’s become ‘home’, you’ve already been there. You can only return. (You can never go home, only go home again.)
My
home?

Star-system: Iiriani/Iiriani-prime. (Yes, a double.)

World: Velm. (No, we never have two soar blobs high in the sky. Iiriani is our sun, and sometimes Iiriani-prime is a blazing star that blues a few degrees of the night or, during some of our days, puts a nova-point in the greenish blue. Iiriani has two more worlds besides Velm, a large one and a small one, neither good for much. Iiriani-prime has a single ball of iron and ice swinging around it called Micha, into whose interior have been sunk a few research stations. And Velm’s got two small moons … like Rhyonon.)

Geosector: M-81. (What else? Well, we call it the Fayne-Vyalou, locally, after the two large plains, one raised, one not, which make up most of it. It lies surrounded by Velm’s southeastern mountains and mineral oil swamps.)

Urban complex: Morgre. (The seven levels of the city – four of them underground – are sunk between a hot -wr and a valley in the Myaluth Range. The upper levels, irregularly spaced at different heights, with their great pylons supporting one atop the other atop the other, are recreation areas, spacious parks …)

Morgre?

Let me tell you about Morgre.

2.

Among urban complexes it’s the third largest in our geosector, which, in world terms, makes it an astonishingly unflamboyant place. If you come expecting one of the great cities of the north – Melchazidor, Ahrun, Katour (with its Grand Triple Run), Eblevelma, or even more southernly Farkit or Hanra’a’sh – you’ll be disappointed.

I don’t know where the basic design for our world’s urban complexes came from. Still, the notion was that, given a certain amount of successful planoforming, the complexes themselves should be ecologically more or less self-contained, which means they could be sunk just about anywhere – and, over most of our world, they are.

But Morgre’s site was chosen with some care.

Where the red rock drape-forms of the Myaluth Range end, a ribbon of hot-swamp – the Hyte-wr – winds out on to the pitted Vyalou Plain. Dozens of species of indigenous gnats, gold, black, and red, swarm above the Hyte’s brackish sludge. During the day the blue erupting fumes are visible for kilometres.

Years before Morgre proper was sunk, several furniture and tool-making collectives organized themselves along the Hyte-wr’s oestern bank, then called Morgre. (Oh, yes: for reasons no doubt lost in colonial archives, our world has five points on its compass: north, east, south, oest, and west – instead of four or six like most others.) The industrial collectives used the swamp’s natural heat to run their machines, while the tolgoth trees (closer to a kind of cactus) foresting the Hyte-wr’s north shore provided their almost unworkably hard pith for lumber.
Processed by an ore-smelting co-op ten kilometres up the narrow Myaluth Pass, sponge-copper and heavier metals were worked into blades, wires, switches, and chips. Chained to their slip-pads with the old-fashioned, black, flat-sided links, the orange ingots had been hauled in along a monoline running part of the three hundred kilometres in from Helk’um Port, where the space shuttles still come in on the lavid plains that hold the circular ridges of ancient craters, eroded away over most of the rest of the world.

The old monoline’s pentalons have been down for fifty years, but their star-form supports are still clamped, in clusters of five, to the pebble-pocked rocksheets. As children, we used to scooter out over the sarb-grass and silvagorse mortaring the porous stones that footed the Myaluths and, wandering among them, guess at what those metre-wide claws grasping the ground could possibly have been, while the black and green coaches of the present monoline whistled above us on humming cables down into the city.

The nematode farm at the southern edge of present Morgre claims an unbroken line in their service cooperative going back well before the sinking of Morgre itself. Its founding year is proclaimed in silver letters over its gates: 2,521 Web Standard. Silver is common on Velm – about as common as calcium was supposed to be (according to Family historians) on Earth. For years, 2,521 was the most repeatedly mentioned date in Morgre’s local facribbons, which, after the six o’clock, two o’clock, and ten o’clock shift-breaks, twisted and blew along the edge of the ground-level alleys where the workers
₂
discarded them – wafting towards the gulping grills of the quietly bellowing cleaners, for all the world like the blue smokes curling over the Hyte.

When I was ten (proportionately more stocky, substantially less hairy), I joined a chemistry study-group in which two of my older groupies worked on the wormfarm with their parents. Soon, half the kids in the group had trial jobs
₂
there. For me, it was sorting spawn samples into glass vials on a dusty plank table, while the shadow of the window pole, from Velm’s larger moon, swung across the floor to give way to the dawning light of, first, our larger, then our minuscule, sun. I thought then that the huge cooling pits outside, the racks of ten- and fifteen-metre strainers casting chequered shadows over the broken fields, and especially the dirt clotting the underground support beams holding up the roofs of the kilometres on kilometres of catacombs where most of the adults worked, must all go back to the founding. Everything, including you, stays so dirty on a nematode farm – which, to a kid like me from Dyethshome, was half the fun. Later, as a teenager, I saw some pictures of the original farm co-op, c. 2,521: a bunch of grinning, grimy women, some human, some evelm, in odd-looking work outfits (bare chests; oddly panelled skirts), toiling on land a fiftieth the size it is now, using hand-strainers and pick-axes on a bit of yield-soil the size of the skene in the Dyethshome amphitheatre.

Such violence to the known turns home into history.

What actually brought Morgre here, however, was the Retreat of the Arvin. I’ve never thought of my world as one where the Family had real influence, yet I know (human) Family adherents from the north first came to the sparsely populated south and built their retreat on the site where a few local evelmi vaguely thought an ancient temple may once have stood. (Which is the Family in a dyllhull for you.) Its glacine cases housed the gold inch, the silver metre, the platinum centimetre bars, the vibrating quartz crystals measuring out nanoseconds
and Standard Years, the plastic molecular models of human DNA, all lovingly imported (supposedly) from world to world, their origin supposed to be the original Old Eyrth. Completing a swing that had already finished in the north and that had no doubt driven the settlers here, the religious revolution which made the Sygn the official dogma of this world arrived in the south; but it was carried out in our area fairly peacefully, well before anyone thought to construct a city. A bunch of locals – some concerned evelmi, some enlightened humans – came round, so goes the tale, and said with lots of tongues at once: ‘Get this tasteless garbage
out
of here!’ and unlike some places throughout the six thousand worlds I could name, there were no staunch objections. (The riots in the polar caves of Minjin-IX; the burnings, the mass slayings among the floating labyrinths on the magma fields of Nok Hardrada …) Of course the Sygn wanted to find the name of the deity or dedicatee of the ‘temple’ on the original site: Arvin is Velm’s smaller moon, which by night looks no larger than Iiriani-prime by day. And Arvin was the best they could come up with, since concepts like ‘temple’, ‘deities’, ‘ancient’, ‘dedicatees’, and even ‘name’ just didn’t fit into the local evelmi culture at the time the way humans might have expected. What replaced the imported holy objects in the newly-renamed-with-its-more-or-less-old-name ‘Retreat of the Arvin’ was, among other things, the earliest vaurine library in the area – where, two hundred fifty years later, I went to see the old projections of the wormfarm, actually. Indeed, some of the original measurement standards – in their original cases, say the little cards under them – were eventually returned to the museum. Since the Sygn is concerned with preserving the local history of local spaces, the Family occupation of the retreat was now part of that history.

So there you are.

Indeed, I only learned the dogma actually practised there was part of the Sygn after I’d spent that year off-world with my Grandmother Genya on Senthy. (The long, thin parks with their sudden curves at the end, where the pockmarked fisherwomen, waiting for work, walked up and down, up and down, under the high transparent roofs stained a perpetual brown by Senthy’s rusty rains.) There I’d seen rituals, cyhnks, and services so vastly different from the ones here at home as to be unrecognizable: then the return, to discover that – the Sygn itself, which is only a name, pronounced a thousand different ways, spelled differently in a hundred different languages – was all it was: but one of Sygn’s most widely spread tenets (and, like everything else in the Sygn dogma, it, too, no matter how wide, does not obtain everywhere) is that history is what is outside, in both time and space, the current moment of home. And without history, there is no home. A second tenet that usually (though, like all else, not always) goes along with the first: when you go to a new world, all you can take of your home is its history. And if you are a woman, your choice is to take it knowingly and be its (and your new home’s) silent friend, or to take it unknowingly and be its (and your new home’s) loud slave.