Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (22 page)

‘Yes, Clearwater. I won’t let George bother me. I hear you. Thanks for the warning. Thanks a lot …’ as the entrance column went dark in the corner around the retreating bronze. On the comscreen Clearwater’s black face melted, glittering, like all night.

Cut through the galaxy’s glitter; slice away all night. What thoughts did I dole out to that world (out of the six thousand, which, according to a rumour that had crept worlds and worlds away, corroborated only by a certain certified psychotic, may have been) destroyed by Xlv?

Certainly I thought about it.

Yet after a week, after a handful of weeks, now at home, now away, somehow the rational part of my mind had accorded it much the weight one gives to the most insubstantial notion.

I was finishing up a fairly simple job
₁
– though today, none are easy. The folk artists in the temperate wastes of Yinysh – a world whose polar caps are sheeted with black ice – make vast mosaics out of tiny laterally sensitive tiles: changes in light cause them to change not their own colour, but to transmit a colour change to the tile beside them: by fine manoeuvrings, this can be worked into a mosaic whose picture moves and changes with the changing sun. Four thousand seven hundred light-years along the rim, an architect in the equatorial stone fields of Batria – a thin-aired planet where atmosphere is released from volcanic fissures in the north and shipped in orange plastic tanks to the planetary midlands – heard of them. As she was also a religious leader for three geosectors, nothing would do but to import the actual tiles to decorate her new pantheon’s sunrise-facing facade. The expense was undertaken in the name of interworld relations. I was hired for expenses (huge) and a modest fee (modest) to shepherd those cartons of glittering hexagons across
five thousand light-years of dark. We had paused on some vasty station orbiting one of Batria’s Lagrange points. I was off ship in a library cubicle looking up information that I thought might come in handy for a job
₁
that I saw a good chance of picking up once I got down to Batria (What’s
my
whimsical historical document turns out to be
your
immoral, tasteless, obscene … Anyway, there’s one reason they need industrial diplomats), when my call number slid up the green tube running past my cubicle, stopped at eye level, and bonged.

I swung the reader away from my nose and turned. The call, when I thought through my reception code (visualize yellow fading slowly to green, while hearing the first three digits of my home-mail routing number recited in my sister Alyxander’s voice, followed by the sudden stench of burnt plastic) ran round the tube in imperative pink: Report instanter to the Web Official at Level Two (that’s quarter gravity), coordinates 12-17.

Curious as to what could possibly be questioned this time about my cargo, I hauled myself out of the cubicle and kicked off through the enamel and silver hall (the library was in the freefall level), from time to time giving myself another pull on the wall railing.

Accelerate in freefall, and you always have the vaguest feeling you’re rising straight up; decelerate, and you have the equally vague feeling you’re falling straight down.

I fell (straight down) at a lift cable, grabbed it, and lifted (straight up and at right angles to my former down) through the side wall. Moments later, I stepped off with the blobby feeling one gets in quarter-normal, and strode unsteadily forward taking giant steps, over the yellow pebbled flooring and under blue hanging gewgaws, with large-leafed plants waving either side.

12-17 was a forest of reflecting panels. I stepped among
them, worked my way around layer after layer; the floor itself became flats of glass over lower flats of mirror. My own reflection reduplicated away from me in myriad directions, heads all turning as I turned, feet all stepping as I stepped. And suddenly I was surrounded by, and confronted with, and interwoven among a woman who looked up at me from her desk and said:

‘Marq Dyeth.’ She smiled with the face of a friendly mule. ‘I haven’t see you for years.’

‘Japril!’ The new blue, green, and red rays around the sunburst on her shoulder told me she’d moved up some in the Web’s hierarchy since we’d last chatted together behind the protective plastic shields on the flame beaches of Shahng-al-Voyard. ‘Honestly,’ I said, ‘you are not whom I expected to see here.’

‘I’m not here, actually.’ She turned in her seat, pushed the desk, which drifted aside on silent rails, and crossed her silver leggings.

2.

I sat on the floppy purple thing inflating blobbily behind me. ‘Just how far away are you?’ It firmed beneath me.

‘More than nine thousand light-years.’ She toyed with something that was gold and thin, black knobs on both ends. (Pencil? Microphone? Letter opener?)

‘That’s a rather costly hyperwave projection just to say hello.’

‘We have forty minutes’ conference time, Marq. A few seconds out for nostalgia won’t hurt – though I doubt if it will help either. We’ll let it go at that.’

I had some good memories of Japril: her insight, her ambition. I also had reason to wonder if some of her memories of me were not so pleasant. ‘I’d thought you’d
be somebody calling to chide me about my current cargo. But this has got to be about some past crime of mine, if not some crime to come.’ Spiders all think industrial diplomacy is a crime; they may be right.

Japril went from smile to grin with those big teeth of hers. ‘Actually, it’s neither.’ Her fingers came together on the golden bar. (Calculator? Energy knife? Water purifier?) ‘Relax. What do you know of Rhyonon?’

A memory of Clym; and a chill. ‘Only that no one is supposed to know
that
much about it.’ Funny thing about that chill. It didn’t subside. There’s something permanently scary about an entire world’s death, even in rumour.

‘What do you know about the rescue operations? The few thousands we got out, say, or the few colony ships the Web managed to load up in hours and evacuate during the course of the disaster? The survivors we managed to prise out of the peripheral ruins and smoking wreckage once the major conflagration was over?’

The Web
is
information; it’s silly to lie to a spider, especially one with that many rays rainbowing her sunburst. ‘Nothing.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘There weren’t any. At least of those.’

See what I mean.

‘You want to know where I am.’ Japril’s fingers moved absently on the stick. (Sound recorder? Cosmetics case? Musical instrument?) Possibly having something to do with it, possibly not, mirrors blanked out among us; reflections vanished. Behind Japril a wide, indistinct window looked out on a brown landscape, boxed and blotted with architectural oddities, some angular, some freeform, many connected by arching tunnels. The sky was salted with stars. ‘I’m at a rescue station on the sixth moon of Chyvon, in the Tyon-Omega system; Chyvon’s a
gas giant one out from Rhyonon. Within an hour of the catastrophe, a rescue station was set up on Rhyonon’s nearest moon and an overflow station here.’

‘Then some
did
get out …?’ hearing, as I said it, how ridiculous it sounded. With two years’ planning, you can lift a few thousand women from one world and relocate them on another. How many can you evacuate within minutes?

‘The station on Rhyonon’s moon was closed down to a skeleton staff within a hundred hours after the catastrophe.’

‘I would have thought that the majority of the refugees – ’ I felt strange calling the survivors of an entire world refugees – ‘would have been brought to the nearer station.’

‘The reason we maintain the skeleton staff on Rhyonon’s moon is at least to suggest – to those who’re suggestible – the possibility of a small refugee population there.’

‘But there isn’t one …?’

‘As far as illusions go, it’s pretty paltry. Believe me, I wasn’t in favour of it when it was decided on.’

‘Japril,’ I said. ‘Are there any survivors at all?’

She took a long time to say: ‘Yes.’

‘And they’re not on Rhyonon’s moon, but rather on that moon of … Chyvon, with you?’

She took an even longer time to nod – throwing me to all those far-flung cultures where a nod does not necessarily signal affirmation. But they were not Japril’s.

Nonchalantly as I could manage, I asked: ‘How many?’

One reason Japril became friends with me in the first place is because of her uncanny ability to see through my diplomatic masks. ‘Why don’t I tell you, instead, your relation to this survivor, Marq?’

‘You mean this woman is a factor in my life of an order other than rumour?’

‘It’s a notable relation. And don’t discount rumour. It’s the real order of business this evening.’ (Where I was, I was thinking of it this afternoon. But no matter.) ‘I’ve noted that relation – ’

‘And the Web wants to exploit it. Which is why you’ve called on me to talk about it – across nine thousand light-years.’ One reason I became friends with Japril is because of how quickly her ambitious and devious plans open all their exfoliations to my view. ‘There
is
a survivor, isn’t there? At least one.’ Really, I was thinking of Clym far more than the various suggestions Japril had all but thrown in front of me.

‘We’ve had Rat Korga here at the station for …’ There was relief in her voice as she said the name to me for the first time; and I got a sense that this was something she had not talked about with many people; and that to talk about it with someone outside a very limited circle was something she had wanted to do for: ‘– well, for a while now.’

3.

‘Let me tell you about Rhyonon, Marq. Sit back and I’ll catalogue the horrors. I’ve done it in enough reports that I can recite it in my sleep. The flame shell,’ Japril said, ‘where it roared across Rhyonon’s surface, was over fifty thousand feet high – which effectively did in any passing air travel. Most of the actual holocaust was confined to the equatorial areas. So was ninety per cent of Rhyonon’s population. The resultant gaseous toxic alone, not to mention the incredible heatstorms that went raging out north and south, pretty well did in the parts of the world
that were not directly burned. Winds over the whole planet rose to nearly six hundred kilometres an hour. In ten hours, the major flaming areas had more or less burned themselves out, with twelve per cent of the planetary surface fused and the atmosphere radically deoxygenated. How’s the reception over there where you are, Marq? I just got a flicker. No, don’t say anything. Just let me go on. In seventeen hours, there was an average drop in temperature recorded over the general surface down to a hundred degrees celsius, or even below that, here and there; and the average was falling. Because we have to mark it somewhere, this is now considered the official termination of the catastrophe, though there were still seas of hundred-fifty-degree muck bubbling around, on places that had never seen temperatures above twenty-five degrees celsius before. Choosing the real moment of termination over something the size of a planet is rather like deciding where the edge of an atomic mushroom cloud is with a ten centimetre rule. But less than twenty hours after the disaster’s commencement we were actually flying through that planetary murk. Marta was glum; and Ynn was putting out the forced cheerfulness that only makes the glum get angry. I called myself keeping my mind on the controls; and never have bothered to ask what I looked like to the others in the rescue boat. It only took us half an hour’s flying over thousands on thousands of square kilometres of lava fields, in the midst of which had once been some of Rhyonon’s major civilized cities of millions, to realize it was a pretty useless search. And how many hours was it after that, our scouting ships veered north and south towards the poles? How many scouting ships were there? And why was ours, among the hundreds called down to quarter and requarter the assigned areas, the one to make the strike? Suddenly our radar, peeking through the blackened air, came back
with the ruin of a building. You have to understand that in places where a day ago there had been urban complexes as big as Vongle or Rimena –’ Japril and I had met in Vongle afloat on Pattuck’s southeastern seas – ‘there were only puddles of boiling mud. Large puddles, too. The deserts in the south had just been scorched – which is to say, that for a few hours a wind somewhat above the temperature of boiling water had raged at several hundred k’s an hour over them, which was enough to do in any but the staunchest surface structures and pretty well all animal life; not to mention plants.

And there was … a ruin!

‘We sat our three-girl boat down beside it. The air was unbreathable – we had to go clomping out through the portal tube in heavy heat suits, because the temperature even here was still in the neighbourhood of sixty degrees. Walking across the sand towards the broken walls, Ynn’s boot toe struck a pile of rubble falling away from something which, as we gathered around it and kicked away more dust, was clearly some desiccated transport machine.

‘Within the roofless walls themselves, there was sand almost a foot deep over what turned out to be thermoplastic floorplates. There was also almost a complete lack of information about what function the station had served or who its inhabitants had been.

‘Only one of us – Ynn – had bothered to learn any of the local Rhyonon languages in the minutes before we’d taken off. You and I, Marq, would have probably considered Rhyonon a fairly primitive place. They didn’t have a General Info system, for what seemed to be essentially religious reasons. They’d even been trying to legislate against the one the Web had set up on their nearer moon and not succeeding. On one of the few strings of cubes lying around that hadn’t melted beyond
decipherment, on which they did their hieroglyphic insect-scratchings, Ynn found mention of a hermetically self-sealing underground refrigerator and storage crypt. Should we investigate? (Since the air was too thick to see through, inside what remained of the building, we watched each other in stereo schemas formed of little coloured squares, reduced from infrared reflections, on stereo face plates inside our masks.) Why not? Back outside, where everything was scrimmed with dirty gold, and the stereo plates could be raised for simple glass – as long as you weren’t trying to make out details on anything more than a metre away – we hauled out the excavators. The blades dropped, began to churn sand. And that’s when Marta, inside the ship for something, called out that the biodetectors, which till now we’d all but forgotten, were blipping and pinging like mad.