Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (44 page)

No, she was only a little taller than I was; but already I was seeing things in Rat’s terms.

As darkened statues gave way to lit ones, she came towards Rat with a strange expression on her human face. (She
was
a female; I hadn’t been sure.) ‘You’re …’ she began. ‘You’re … really him. The survivor? I’ve called dozens of people, getting descriptions, composite and speculative portraits. I went everywhere I thought you might be. I knew you couldn’t have been where the crowds were gathering. But I also knew you had gone through a park level run out near Whitefalls this morning. I took a chance on a similar run, here, waiting for hours on the possibility – ’ She stopped, brought her gloved hand back to the opening cut away around her pubis. ‘I’ve been mistaken three times already … I mean, you
are
the – ’

I actually started a diplomatic evasion, hesitating only over my confusion as to whether it would work or not, when Rat’s hand dropped from my shoulder. ‘I am Rat Korga, the survivor.’

‘You …
really
are?’

I dropped my hand from Rat’s.

She came a few steps up the walk.

We passed some people strolling in the opposite direction.

‘May I touch you? Please! You’ve survived a world – and to both sides she turned her eyes momentarily, as lights swept back beside us, dark as Rat’s in half-light, before she stepped forward.

Rat stepped forward too.

‘Please, I want to touch you – or you to touch me.
That would be better – ’ She seemed suddenly to remember herself. ‘With your friend, if you like.’

‘I don’t want to have sex with a female,’ Rat said. ‘Now. Here. We came into this run because, on our way, we might find men – males. Here.’

‘But you – ’ She stepped closer. ‘I thought perhaps you’d be – you would understand. Because of what you’ve survived. I need you to …’

Rat put both his hands, ringed and unringed, on the dark-haired woman’s shoulders. As we passed more lights, his eyes went from clear green to clear. ‘Leave this run. Please. I think you should leave this run. It would be better if you left this run.’ (I actually found myself smiling: One after another, Rat was running through all our polite forms of requesting someone to leave.) ‘I feel that you should leave – ’

‘Oh, but I – ’ She blinked, uncertainly. The coloured insignia on the patch of shoulder scales told of a job
₂
at a major distillation house, which left her job
₁
open.

‘Please leave this run,’ Rat said. ‘You don’t belong here.’

She seemed to pull her wide shoulders in from under his hands. She raised one wrist up towards her mouth. ‘But I need …’ Then, with the beating eyes and intricate expression of someone who has learned some desperate necessity will not be met, she stepped back. Then, anger. Her noise was more evelmian hiss than human growl. She turned and walked off between some five women (all males or neuters, all but one evelmi) who had stepped up to watch.

Rat turned to me. ‘Did I speak improperly, Marq?’

One watcher reared on hind legs. ‘I’m glad you said it. It’s something we all feel.’ I wondered if we were going to have to hear something about human women being more likely to show up where they’re not wanted than
evelm. A commonplace of the south, it still makes me uncomfortable.

But there was only the soft boom: ‘Most of us are too polite.’

The others laughed in a pulsing admixture of racial laughters. And the shortest one of them walked up and began to lick Rat’s face – the human, wouldn’t you know. Rat turned away; his hand, back on my shoulder, urged me on with a motion recalling the one I’d started him with on our way to the g’gia.

We walked on up the walk.

We walked off it, between statues, where now were three, now twelve, now two, some entwined with one another, some watching, now a hand, not his, lingering somewhere on his body or mine. Once we moved through maybe twenty, most in sexual contact with one another. In such groups, running, we were too close for personal recognition. Eyes, neither black nor silver, moved near, moved away, while others moved in to replace them, the many bodies centimetres away moving together, apart, in the warmth, a moment of cool as contact broke, then warmth again, to hold, to handle, and, even though we only moved through, as supportive as if we’d stayed.

2.

A dozen women wandered Water Alley, younger ones sprinting. As we came off the stairway, I saw gold claws lock the column across at the butchers’ union, and the face of the little redhead, peering over the other apprentice’s scaled shoulder. Then they were off inside.

‘Come on, Rat.’

We started across cracked blue, when Si’id rushed out between the two kids. ‘Marq Dyeth …’ Her tone was
conspiratorial, her arms heavy and hairy, and I recalled, from some drunken encounter years ago, her telling me that when she was in the bath and the water washed back towards her neck, all those hairs curved around to look like scales: ‘Excuse me, Marq …’ She was in front of us, so we had to stop. ‘I’m so pleased to meet your friend. I cannot say, with my poor single tongue, the honour it is. Really – ’ One hand on my arm, she guided me around, perhaps to avoid the people. Rat stepped around with me. ‘I have hungered all day for this honour – ’ A sudden grin. ‘But you saw, I had stationed my young ones out to wait for you – like hunters spying for the passing of dragons, yes? But then, it’s clear, the whole of Morgre has developed an appetite for our fine friend.’ She held a breath, making fists of both reddened hands; then she said: ‘You survived!’ A fist went high as Rat’s elbow. ‘You survived – what that must have required from you! What it must have meant for you. And what it means to us – ’ She bent forward. ‘What it means for any creature with a sense of her own life as a closed limited system. We are all famished for a taste of that survival, Rat Korga …’ Si’id pulled her lower lip into her mouth for a moment. Suddenly she stepped back to paw among robes and aprons. ‘It would be such an honour if you’d let us satisfy that appetite. I know your friend, Dyeth – ’ She nodded to me while she peered in one pouch, then thrust her artificially clawed hand in another – ‘would urge you to accept.’ From a left pocket she finally pulled a sampling knife. Multiple steels glistened from brass bladespines. Rubberized clamp and stained bone handle both looked well worn. ‘There’s very little pain involved. Marq can assure you of that, if you’re unfamiliar with the custom. But if you would give some of your flesh to appease our hunger …’ She reached forward with the knife towards Rat’s shoulder.

‘Will I be killed now?’ Rat asked.

‘No, but –
Look
, Si’id!’ I took her wrist. ‘You can’t just run out and slice off a piece of meat to start a cloning culture just like – Hey!’ Because Si’id had taken Rat’s arm in one hand. ‘Come on, why don’t you let Rat come back some other day so that –’

‘But it would be such a triumph!’ Si’id pushed the blades and clamps against Rat’s shoulder.

Rat didn’t flinch because, well, that’s just the way Rat was. ‘A triumph for the union.’ Si’id squeezed the sampler’s trigger.

I was surprised, confused, and angry. I started to pull Rat away. But a microscopic needle, sunk to the bone marrow to gather generating cellular material, can hurt if wiggled. The three surface blades bit in to collect dermal enzymes and to hold the needle steady while it was digging.

Si’id released the trigger. Somewhere from within Rat’s shoulder a microneedle withdrew. The blades came away from the flesh, leaving three little reddish lines, one of which spilled one, and another, then a third scarlet drop down Rat’s arm.

‘Oh, thank you!’ Si’id exclaimed. ‘Yes, a beautiful sample. We will savour the complexities of your flesh for years to come, and it will lend its subtleties to myriad complex meals. Marq Dyeth?’ Si’id turned to me. ‘Your new friend is a joy and an honour to Whitefalls. To Morgre. To our Fayne-Vyalou. To our world!’

I started to say something ugly, but five or six women had stopped to watch; and two others were coming over. I took Rat’s arm, starting to speak and feeling him start with me so that speech was unnecessary.

‘Felicitations!’ Si’id called out after us. ‘What a wondrous pedigree this will begin. Wonderful!’

I said: ‘Come
on
, Rat.’

‘You have honoured our union with a gift to the taste of our whole populace!’

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

As we walked, he reached across to rub his shoulder. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Oh, soon they’ll have that little piece of you growing up on their shelf behind a big coppermesh screen.’ I’d always thought of mine as a pretty civilized world – at least my section of it. But when your local butcher
₁
comes up and just helps herself to some of your perfect erotic object’s most intimate genetic material – ! ‘Come on, Rat, let’s get back to Dyethshome. We’ll be there in a minute.’

3.

When we came off the rollerwalk, through the wall of high, yellow cactus, many, many women – many more than had been in the industrial rotunda – crowded the wide pathway, or stood before the steps, or squatted on the high rocks around, obscuring green flags, stone pools, and layered mirror portals.

‘Marq Dyeth –?’

It was (ex-medical technologist
₂
) Mima.

‘Marq Dyeth, this way.’ She licked air for us to come over. We hurried to her. ‘This way!’ As the three of us trotted behind the crowd, Mima explained: ‘We’ve got students all along here, waiting for you. We, at least, know what you look like. Most of those around here don’t – yet. How did … you like your dragon hunt, Rat Korga?’

And Korga, striding by me, admitted in his rough voice: ‘It was the most thrilling thing I have done.’ As we
sidestepped a clump of women, two of whom reared to watch him, he added, ‘Ever.’

Mima smiled in a way that suddenly made me like her a lot. ‘We’re going to take you in through the entrance into the North Court.’

I knew it was there, but I don’t believe I’d ever used it. But that’s Dyethshome. From behind a cactus whose knobby stalks were streaked beige, our algae farmer
₂
looked out and gestured as we reached her. ‘This way. This way …’ Clearly she was enjoying herself.

The clay that Rat and I ended up on was brown, with yellow to one side and to the other green. Mima and the farmer crowded us on to it (some women turned to glance at us), and one or the other of them thought something.

We fell into the ground.

- and were hurrying through a hallway whose straight ribs met overhead at a completely unfamiliar angle.

‘Here …’ from the algae farmer
₂
. ‘At least I think it’s here.’ The embossed metal plate bore designs I had perhaps last seen before I went to Senthy. But when you live in an institution with over fifteen kilometres of connecting hallways, ten of which are almost never used …

The North Hall is tall.

Stained-glass portals let in light six metres up its west wall. Among the thirty-foot columns about its terraced floor, the memory of an assassination two centuries past still chills.

We wandered across grey flooring that glowed red about our feet, no doubt through the same technology that had lit guide arrows in the industrial rotunda. As we walked, the light gleaming off Rat’s blocky ankle turned purple; that about Mima’s, blue; about mine, green; the farmer’s heliotrope. (A ball here begins all bloody and
ends all rainbow.) We moved towards the steps up to the bright blades of the door.

‘Rat,’ the algae farmer
₂
said suddenly, ‘the woman who wore those rings you have on
murdered
someone in this room!’ with the same delighted grin with which the students had been negotiating the general excitement.

My head jerked around – too little to be seen? But the account seemed so anaemic, so reduced, that I felt, here, in my home, I had been jerked out of my own world. One risks that, living in an historical artifact, inhabited by its students. We mounted into mirrors that began to swing, their backings pitted, their surfaces stained yellow as human urine.

I had never felt this hall the heart of my home. (Vacant, avoided, disused.) Despite all ancient reason, it had become completely marginal. But a student’s word, as it displaced me from my own image of its history, by the same movement, replaced this abandoned hall in some eccentric centrality that only struck me as we left it.

4.

Water rilled, divided at the shallow carvings, closed over them, chattering, and rippled up the tall ones to the brown and green water line. Blue and white water spumed along the spill, to swirl the ramp foot across the hall before it fountained and fell, foaming.

Kal’k said: ‘… and I thought Vol’d, Abrak’d, and Vo’d’ard’d, since they were in Morgre; Jayne spoke with them this morning …’

Hirum said: ‘… then, of course, I asked Vizakar, Mammam’m, and Clent from the farm, who should be here soon …’

Shoshana asked: ‘… is Santine available? Oh, I know
it’s late. But she’s been so considerate in formal emergencies …’

Sel’v said: ‘… can’t always count on tracer representatives every time we throw together a snack. But we have Menek coming. She’s likely to bring someone impressive …’

Max, with Egri at her purple mid-haunches, came over the small bridge. ‘Well, Rat Korga, as my child’s companion, you will certainly be one of the most honoured of our visitors.’

Hatti asked: ‘How many of the students have accepted?’

Black Lars answered: ‘All of them.’

‘Oh. Well, I suppose it’ll be all right. It
is
because of you.’ Rearing, Sel’v expanded a protective wing about Rat’s shoulder. ‘That’s astonishing … Students don’t usually like formal occasions.
All
of them?’

Black Lars nodded her black head.

Tinjo came up slowly, leaving wet footprints on the stone. The waters roared around us. ‘Why are all those people out front? Are we going to invite them in?’

‘I was thinking of it,’ Large Maxa said.

‘Of
course
not!’ Egri declared. ‘They’re here to see Rat. We can’t just put a guest on display like that. We’ll no more invite them in than we’ll send Rat out.’