Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (43 page)

Ollivet’t, now that some formal greeting had taken place, settled back a little without actually sitting, which you can do if you have six legs, and asked: ‘Who are you?’

From where she squatted, JoBonnot let out a sharp laugh. Her body mask had sealed to her neck again, forming a petular collar.

‘I am Rat Korga, who survived the destruction of the world Rhyonon.’

‘… destruction of a world?’ Shalleme pushed herself up on one arm.

‘How can a world be destroyed?’ Ollivet’t asked, selecting a stone for herself with one broad tongue, then going to offer Santine one.

Rat said: ‘Fire fell from the sky. Deserts melted to slag. Urban complexes, runs through the wild, and tribal federations were scorched away like flavours burned out of over-charred foods. Cultural Fugue, perhaps.’ (It was about here that I realized these were all borrowed metaphors.) ‘Perhaps worse. I alone can say that I was there.’

‘And that’s why all these people are gathering, waiting.’ Santine regarded her rock while Ollivet’t moved on to me, to JoBonnot, to Shalleme. ‘I would have come out to see you too, Rat, but as Marq’s friend, I can see you even closer this way.’

Shalleme, glancing at the rest of us who had come from such scattered spots over this one, asked, ‘What does it …
feel
like, to have lost an entire world?’

‘Lonely.’ Rat raised his many-ringed hand to rub at his neck
under his broad jaw. ‘But the loneliness comes from the question.’

‘The question, hey, Skoilla Rat?’ JoBonnot, beside her cushion, rested only a white damasked glove on the webbed and re-webbed cover rug. ‘Tell a visitor to these alien climes what you mean.’

‘“What is it like to lose a world?” is the first question everyone who meets me asks; so I am alone with my own feelings, sights, sounds, and experiences, which can only provide answer to the question: What is it like to be presented with a new one?’

I actually started to ask: What was the first thing I asked you, Rat …? I turned on my cushion, lifted one hand from the rug – and was left with silence, in which I discovered I didn’t remember the first question I’d asked him. And wondered if that meant Rat didn’t remember either.

JoBonnot laughed. ‘It seems that everyone – at least everyone currently in Morgre – wants to know who this survivor is, how this survivor survived. Odd, don’t you think?’

Ollivet’t retired to her own cushion and sat, leaving Rat standing – like someone very used to standing, though. ‘But I am curious, too.’

‘You …’ Rat paused – ‘create me with your eyes.’

While we were all tasting the odd flavour the statement left us, JoBonnot laughed again. ‘Ah, that is like a poem – like the kinds of words your glorious Vondramach Okk would have put together in her odd and awkward language, yes, Skynia Marq? But I have come a long way to see you, Rat Korga, a very long way. I did not make you by pressing my eye or my tongue or my ear to you. So that is what is wrong with poetry. I think your glorious Vondramach must have known that, for she was a great saint too, yes? I honour her greatly: and I look at you
and see exactly what you are, Rat Korga. I look at you and see the clear and cloudy intersections of what you must have been with what you may become. And that is what I have come here to see. And I am pleased with it.’

Rat watched her with empty sockets.

Was it the singsong quality of her voice? Or was it just some diplomatic
₁
sense? I said: ‘JoBonnot, you’re not from this world, are you?’

She gave me a bright smile. ‘This world? This Velm, that circles the larger of the binary, Iiriani/Iiriani-prime, swirling two moons about it as it goes? Oh, no. Certainly I could never be from this world.’ She shook her head. ‘Yes, that
is
a silly suggestion.’

‘Then why have you taken on the honorific system of …’ I glanced at Santine – ‘the Klabanuk area, off in G19?’

‘Did it fool you, perhaps? For just a bit?’ JoBonnot shook her head. ‘When we were together on the other side of the galaxy, I didn’t even know whether you recognized it. On your part, very diplomatic, Skeol Marq. Very diplomatic. Really it was the only recent program available to me on my own local GI series that concerned a region on your world anywhere near Morgre.’ She looked about the cave, let her eyes close, and drew in a lingering breath as if savouring the local actuality. ‘So I learned it – just another of the gambles one must take in my profession
₁
. There is no way to really know if I have won or lost. I fool you. I get a little time: to sit and talk with you. To watch you. To learn. And to teach. I hope I can teach as well as you, Marq Dyeth.’

‘Are you a free-agented professional
₁
?’ I asked.

‘Like my little friend, Clym, looking so much like you?’ She laughed, glancing about at the others, while I wondered what they made of all this. ‘No. Clym is crazy. I am sane. You will find that I am profoundly sane.’

‘Where are you from?’ Santine asked.

‘I? Where do I come from?’ JoBonnot shook her head. Collar petals flapped. ‘I thought you’d never ask. I am from a world where what you call night snaps about with lightning almost every day. I am from a world that sits on the edge of the Cultural Fugue and looks at you for aid and succour. Will you help us? Oh, I feel sure you would if you could. I am from a world where the Family and the Sygn contend to establish their incompatible versions of peace. I am from a world you may even know, Marq Dyeth – though worlds are big places and therefore you cannot know it as I do.’ She slapped her knees. ‘I am from Nepiy. Got unlimited space-fare, too – though I have to use it within limits. That’s better than
some
people you know.’ In a couple of awkward motions, she stood, while the petals suddenly flapped up to close around her face so that one could see her lips moving behind the mouth grill, her lids blinking behind clear eyescreens. ‘Would you like to check on my accuracy in delivering your sister’s message? Here, we’ve reached a call station. Between the Family and the Sygn, you know, there’s a war on – though it is many worlds away. In such circumstances, with the fate of millions hanging in the balance – yes? –
I
certainly would never let such an opportunity pass to check it out. Oh, no, Skyle Marq, that is not any kind of good diplomacy.’

I frowned, starting to wave away her hyperbolic suggestions; but some misgiving made me suddenly stand. ‘Excuse me,’ I said to Ollivet’t and Shalleme. ‘May I use your photocall facilities? I’ll recredit it.’

‘Certainly,’ said Shalleme.

I stepped to the side of the room, where the connections are better. I thought through the access code (my name repeated on three musical tones, followed by the ammoniated smell of cut tolgoth). ‘Black Lars?’

The blue fog of ‘hold’.

Then Lars raised one claw towards her chest and said, ‘Marq, I’m so glad you called. Did you get my message?’

I grinned, very much relaxed. ‘I think so. A woman called JoBonnot told me you cancelled our informal supper tonight? …’

Black Lars settled back and dropped her claw. ‘Oh, I’m so glad. I knew you were out-of-city-limits, and wasn’t sure how to get in touch. We can expect you and Rat here in an hour?’

‘An hour? I thought you said supper was cancelled.’

‘Yes, the informal supper.’ Lars dropped her head to the side. ‘Didn’t you get the whole message? We’re having a formal supper instead. That’s why I cancelled mine. We begin in an hour.’

‘Formal?’ I asked. ‘What on Velm for?’

She bent her lip ridge in laugher. ‘Nothing on Velm. On Zetzor.’ She reared up on her hind legs and folded four sets of claws together in a metallic knot before her stomach scales. ‘The Thants called up Max six hours ago, said they’d all just arrived. They made it clear they have something momentous to say, though nobody knows what. Everyone has been running around here as though fire-gnats had clustered under their vests.’ Suddenly she spread her left wing and beat it violently before her. ‘Well, the woman must not have remembered the whole message when she delivered it to you. I can see you looking confused. It’s understandable, Marq. She’s a foreigner from somewhere out near Hysy’oppi, and, though she’s very nice, she doesn’t know our local dialect terribly well. She was with the students this afternoon, and when I said I wanted to get to you, she volunteered to deliver a message. At any rate, our informal supper is cancelled. And you must be back within an hour, because we’re having a formal one in its place.’

I started to say something, but her other wing now swept around before her.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there – we’ll be there, Rat and me.’ I blinked.

And saw Santine and Ollivet’t and Shalleme sitting about the cushions in the small talk that always quiets when somebody goes to the wall to call.

Rat still stood, still watched.

JoBonnot was squatting again, now that I had come out of my seconds of call-trance. She turned to me with fragments of her grin visible through the grill. ‘Well, you have begun learning to what extent you can trust me – trust me to distort information. Because everyone does. Very good, don’t you think?’ She grimaced. ‘Not very
much
distortion? But that is what this Family/Sygn conflict is all about. A few more times, and you will have an almost trustworthy model of what to expect of me. Very good? That’s because I
am
so profoundly sane. I think eventually you, Skinu Marq, or maybe you, Skina Rat, will like that very much.’

I looked around the room, at Santine, at Shalleme, and Ollivet’t, and suddenly felt very apart from all three.

‘No doubt you want to return to Dyethshome. With your good friend, Rat Korga. You are two in whom I am greatly interested, and I certainly offer my help. Oh, yes. The kinds of situations to which you returned at the hunting union will strew your path all the way to Dyethshome. And I have engineered even more restful, pleasing, and convenient ways to circumvent them than I did to get you here. Easy, pleasant, convenient, oh yes? Come with me.’

Perhaps it was her association with little crazy Clym, or just the general confusion that seemed to inform everything.

Did I start for the door, or for hollow-eyed Rat beside
it? (Yet someone who is all that was ever desired is as much escape as home; and his eyes that were not there met mine.) I saw Santine start. I knew Doru and Doru were confused. I pushed through the spokes hanging at the door and knew Rat followed me. I heard JoBonnot call: ‘So quickly you go? Without me?’

But I was already hurrying outside where seven city levels weighed over me and a topple down a million and a quarter years (non-standard) of archaeology hung below; as we rushed along the apartment ring towards the exit rollerwalk, Rat closing behind me, I was overwhelmed by how much, future and past, distorted all present vision.

‘Do you want to go through the run?’ I stopped at frilly dyll.

Rat squeezed my shoulder. ‘Yes. Is it shorter?’

I glanced up between girders. Park lights blotted the dimmer stars. ‘No. But sometimes you just feel better when you come out the other end.’

We weren’t
in
the park, but in a fourth level industrial sector cassetted to look like one. And when we stepped through the mossy siding over the blue trough, we came not through the irregularly glazed ceramic walls of the upper level runs, but through metal ribs that joined at the peak of the vaulted hall.

The foot pool before the door was half-covered with some organic slough. I didn’t step in it and didn’t remind Rat to. A rollerway moved sluggishly. I stepped on it, drifted forward of Rat, who a moment later caught up, looking around at the ceiling vault, at the tall, intricate, and unremarkable sculptures to our left. A section of ceiling lights had gone out, so the most remarkable thing about the pieces carried back at their evenly disordered distances (prescribed by city ordinance) was the shadow between them.

Ahead, a voyeurlight glowed between two larger statues. As we drifted up, we saw two males, both evelmi, the smaller covering the larger, claws loose and legs tight about the flanks of the other, haunches, three pair, hunching and hunching. Both wore patches of simulated blue scales over their normal black and green. Both wore the double half-scaled cloaks, one at each shoulder, that
most women – whatever their race, whatever their sex – have long forgotten began as a human attempt to imitate the great wings of the neuters.

Rat turned to watch them, scratching his chest with naked nubs, then sliding that hand down his belly.

‘Rat, did you have runs … places like this, on Rhyonon?’

‘Yes.’ Another work of art, in darkness, passed. ‘But they were not – well, all over the way they are here. And they were illegal. But we had them. The ones just for males like me – and you – were always shut down when the authorities found them, because the people who used them were too young. The ones for men and women stayed around much longer.’

I chuckled. ‘Here, each neighbourhood is required to have at least three different kinds. But the runs were here before humans came. They’re an integral part of most Velmian cultures. We just moved right into them, at least in the south.’

Rat asked: ‘And this is just for males here? Very tall, or very short ones. Like me? And you?’

I frowned. ‘This one has the same makeup as the one we were in before. The style is a little different, though.’

‘But no females,’ Rat said. ‘No very tall woman, like the one who took us to the caves. They don’t come here?’

‘There’s nothing to keep anyone from dropping in to take a look,’ I said. ‘And we all do. But I believe there actually are some ordinances about forced participation in sexual acts in any run. By and large the character of a run isn’t so much a matter of edict as expediency. As far as height’s concerned well …’ I shrugged. ‘This one happens to be one we can feel at home in and also happens to take us towards – ’

She must have been resting in a cushioned alcove
beside the rollerway. She uncoiled, all in green scales, and sprang to the walk.

Rat – I felt it in his grip – flinched.