Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (17 page)

I didn’t say (indeed, I probably didn’t think): That’s why we’re killing you in the north. Rather I found myself simply uncomfortable with this, from one of my oldest friends. I was about to question this discomfort as diplomatically as I could when Santine lunged forward.

‘Here is your book.’

I pushed myself up on one elbow, took it, and reached for the chain hanging from my waist. ‘Thank you.’ There was a ring on one side of the volume, which I snapped to the ornate clip at the chain’s end –

– and thought of a row of small yellow lights in the distance.

‘Oh,’ Santine said; she had obviously thought the same thing. ‘I think you have a photocall.’

‘Excuse me,’ I said. I stood up from the cushions and looked about for a stone wall. Near the wall, connections are always better. I walked towards the mound of schist beside the lowest tier of seats, and thought through my reception code:

‘Oh, Marq!’ My mother, V’vish, clasped her foreclaws and declared with two tongues at once:

I took a deep breath. Is it formal?’

‘Oh, no. Just come home, please. We don’t ask much of you, but we love you.’ And with another tongue: ‘And we’d love for Santine to come, if she would.’

‘I’ll ask her,’ I said – then tried to change my voice a little, which is a habit we single-tongued humans here get into in childhood, but which, except when talking to my parents, I’ve mercifully (almost) broken. ‘And I’m on my way.’

I turned from the wall as V’vish vanished.

‘They want you, don’t they,’ Santine said. ‘Do they want me too?’

‘They do. Will you come? It’s an informal party for some offworld friends. The Thants …? But I know you’ve met them.’

‘If it’s an informal affair, I’ll be along in an informal
amount of time. Tell your parents, won’t you, to expect me?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘Good.’ And with her broad, beautiful wings unfurled and boisterously beating, she shooed me towards the entrance plate. ‘Get on with you then,’ she cried; and with other tongues: ‘Get out … ! Get out … !’ and with still another: ‘You’ll see me later in the evening. I look forward to seeing you at your home!’

‘Yes, Santine,’ I said, as the night breeze and the air from her contracting wings, in the midst of the rising fall, joined the roar of dark Dylleaf’s cleaning winds.

4.

Up a level, across the park, down one run and along the rollerway – which once had seats but now only has the worn pentagonal spots where the cleats had been removed.

Thoughts while rolling through my hometown:

On Morgre’s lowest level there are, today, twelve- and twenty-rack vegetable farms, with huge metaquartz light-conduits leading down from the overground parks. There are distilleries for the liquor we make in a number of Velm’s southeast geosectors from the wild sarb-grasses. There are swimming pools, design mills, a dozen fine cheese houses, which still make their various wheels and stars of green-, yellow- and orange-rinded cheese from the fine nematode milk the out-city farm produces. There are ceramic works and aquaria, and what has slowly gained a reputation as the finest manufactory of personal electronic musical instruments in the hemisphere. (The biannual music festival held at Morgre, in which composers
come from all over our world to have their works performed, was one of the joys of my adolescence.) On ground level and the first sub-ground level, three-quarters of the population still lives. Wide alleys twist between and up and down the roller-ramps and stairs about them. Those who live above ground mostly have skylights in at least one of their living rooms. (Those below, I’ve always noticed, have so much more varied holoramas outside their window-walls or in their surround rooms.) Rolling walks take people beneath the girders supporting the parks above, past the various outlets of the various service unions. Broadlifts are always going up and down, their rails sliding closed, and the young and old women of both races are always disappearing up into, or appearing down from, the upper, vine-hung parks.

It’s more or less inevitable: those who work
₂
in the out-city communes and co-ops ringing an urban complex always feel themselves slightly superior to those who work
₂
within the complex itself, especially when the out-city co-ops are so old and well established as the furniture factory, Dyethshome, or the Farm … Yet there are so many advantages to life within the city – more parks, more runs, more pools, more dancing areas, more, and more varied kinds of, sex, greater varieties of social and cultural stimulation, more adventure, and more play – that the twin pulls, of prestige in one direction and excitement in the other, keep the general population moving both ways. In an efficient bureaucratic anarchy – our most common form of government on Velm – there are very few jobs
₂
that one keeps for more than five years. (Your job
₁
is another story.) And since your job
₂
is pretty much the one that determines where you live, a good third of the population is constantly moving out to live in the outskirting co-ops when the outer-city jobs
₂
open up; or, by the same cycle, are moving in to sample
centre-city life. And it tends to be a different third all the time. Still, I was no more than thirteen and a year back from Senthy when I first realized that somehow those in my home, Dyethshome, were exempt from this cyclic flow – though I’m sure the council-board who, seven generations before, had authorized Mother Dyeth to accept the gift that Vondramach had offered her, saw it as nothing more than a large out-city commune, even if the idea of a commune that was nothing but a work of art struck them as unusual – and might even have aroused downright hostile suspicions in that board’s ancestors on their other worlds.

Myself, though I’ve lived in Morgre and other urban complexes on Velm (and off) many times, indeed loved life in the inner city with the passion of a youngster loosed from the toils of tertiary homework
₃
, I was always on a labour
₂
-sabbatical when I lived inside, never on a job
₂
. My friends there tended to be others with as much free time as I, though they might have been in all or any other jobs
₂
, inner or outer, only weeks before. All
my
jobs
₂
have ended up in the out-city communes, where frankly I feel more at home when I’m working at anything other than my profession
₁
: diplomacy.

I’m not the only Dyeth to whom this applies.

Because of this, from time to time, close friends – like Santine – have remarked I have a different manner about me, something other than just my being human. They more or less find it amusing. When I was younger, I would look within myself when women said this, to seek out the pains of being different and to wonder how I’d been wounded by my isolation in the outer-circle’s older labour co-ops. Yet offworld folk like the Thants take the same manner – which for us Dyeths marks a hurt, a failure, a deprivation – and read it rather as a mark of
privilege. Which in turn makes us find them somewhat amusing.

Among its three free-standing, two-hundred-metre multichrome walls, their transparent panes gone dazzling at Iirianiset, on the eastern rim of Morgre just beyond the blue tiles of Water Alley, by Whitefalls, rise the courts of Dyethshome.

5.

I rushed up the steps across green flags, wondering where the Thants had been on their way to that had allowed them to stop off at southern Velm for a visit. You understand their world is very different from ours. (Their sun system: Quorja. Their moonless world, sixth out: Zetzor. Their city, called 17, is blasted among myriads into the rock wall of a three-kilometre-deep canyon that worms and branches and doubles back and rebranches for several thousand k’s about Zetzor’s permanently dark north pole. Yes, Quorja is about sixty-eight thousand light-years around the galactic rim from Iiriani.) I’ve said that interstellar travel is expensive? To promote cultural interchange, some of Zetzor’s larger geosectors finance one of their reproductive communes to unlimited fare for travel anywhere about the galaxy. (Myself, and every other ID, has to get a job
₁
where fare expenses are taken up by the employer
₁
requesting the import.) Once, I made the mistake of asking Thadeus Thant how she and her spouses and her offspring had been chosen for such an honour. Somewhere behind careening metal, she laughed. ‘Well, considering that we’re chosen from the population of an entire world, you can be sure the selection isn’t
entirely
fair …’ I raised an eyebrow and (diplomatically?) changed the subject. At some point in their random
travels they’d met my mother Egri (also an ID) just before she retired about ten years ago. Striking up a friendship, they’ve been dropping in to see us once or twice a year standard ever since. A visit from the Thants at Dyethshome – Death’s Home is how it’s still pronounced, though vowels have shifted and, in the last hundred years or so, space and punctuation have fallen out – is ebullient goodwill, lavish and humorous gifts (that the Thants buy or have made, by the bye,
after
they get here. The importation of offworld gifts? Even their lavish geosector government can’t afford to go that far.) It’s Thantish awkwardness, if not downright insincerity, growing from their reception and friendship with a stream so old and so august, at least the way it tastes to their tongues, as Dyeth.

‘That – ’ Alsrod Thant put her small brown hands behind her, gazing up at the crystal column – ‘is your grandmother, your seven-times great-grandmother, the source of your stream, Gylda Dyeth?’

I chuckled. ‘It’s what they used to call a simulated synapse casting. All the soft lights and multicoloured flashes inside
supposedly
reproduce her personality, in crystalline form.’

The glimmering pillar rose from its ornate metal pedestal to soar beside the wall decorations next to the blades of the door, till it disappeared into the equally ornate capital, one with the court’s roof, where silver tracery pictured what one evelm artist had thought she’d seen in our stars.

‘Shall I tell you the story connected with it?’

Alsrod’s hands came before her to clasp in mimed ecstasy beneath her brown chin.

I put my hand on her shoulder. ‘Mother Dyeth lived well into the fourth generation of her children. The
casting was taken right at the old lady’s demise. A decent length of time after her bodily passing, when it was turned on, so we’ve all been told, the capital speaker up there announced: “Now, I’m a mechanical reproduction. Not the real thing at all. I know it. You know it. You were fools to get this thing made in the first place. Frankly, I’d turn it off if I were you and let me
stay
dead,” which was so uncannily like Mother Dyeth in life, everyone was quite astounded at the synapse caster’s skill.’

‘Did they obey?’

I nodded. ‘I don’t think there’s anyone among us who knows
how
to turn it on today – though when I was a child, sometimes we would stand around, my sisters and I, and all try to put our arms around it, not quite able to touch.’

‘Telling me this,’ Alsrod said with, suddenly, a very pleased look, ‘you’re just doing your job
₂
, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ I smiled, a bit puzzled. ‘I am. That’s by and large what I mostly work
₂
at.’

‘Does that mean that you don’t really
want
to tell me such things?’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘but I like my work
₂
as well as my work
₁
. And I like my work
₁
a lot.’ Then added, because this seemed the moment to do so: ‘Perhaps we should go back to the others …?’ I turned with her to walk towards where her sisters waited on one of the stone benches, while talk trickled about in the hall behind them, between my parents and theirs. Alsrod Thant, the youngest Thant, fourteen standard years now, bony, brown, and delicate eared, her head shaved – really a rather genial child – and this was her first trip to another world with her parents. (She’d assured me with studied modesty that she’d been to moons before … no, not Zetzor’s. Zetzor doesn’t have any.) Though she knew us
and we knew her from numerous vaurine projections, still it was the first time we’d met her in vivo. I’d found her charming. For all the circles in dull aluminium that hung around her neck and waist and shoulders and calves, I couldn’t help thinking of her as a younger me.

I sat.

Alsrod sat – between her older sisters, Fibermich and Nea. My sisters Alyxander and Black Lars came up at that moment to sit by me. A little ways off, George Thant scowled, arms folded over her big metallic chest, like some colossus from an artistic tradition I wasn’t quite familiar with.

Across the room I thought I heard Thadeus declaim: ‘A world, you see, called Nepiy …’ and my attention turned.

But Fibermich brought it back with a continuation of some conversation which we’d apparently joined. ‘Let me tell you.’ Her brown hand hovered and quivered, like an object intended for steady focus, but which, because it held too much energy to remain static, kept blurring into a faster time frame. ‘We were on Bragenvold, in some northern geosector. Incidentally, they really don’t
think
in geosectors on Bragenvold because the political alliances are between interconnected and interwoven nets of city-states: the Blue Net, the Red Net, the Green Net, the Orange Net. Well, there we were in the capital burg of the Green Net, kilometres underground, and with the capitals of the Red, White, and Tyrian Nets less than a day’s work away with a jackhammer on three different sides of us. (Oh, they
are
labour-intensive in those underground caves. And the people in hand-arm intensive societies look so different from those in leg-foot intensive cultures – don’t you find?) As we rowed down the city’s central canal, there was a circular facade, carved into the rockface itself, oh, maybe seventy-five metres high.
Painted above the narrow doorslits, in the local colour-code syllabary:
Do not profane your origins on Eld Eyrth.’