Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (45 page)

Just then the reservoir behind the hall’s south wall filled. The fluted lips overflowed. Ten metres of sculptural mosaics became a green and white cascade. ‘Well, to your food, your food!’ Hatti admonished. ‘To your –’

Sel’v suddenly expanded both wings and reared. ‘Oh, dear. We’ve got a photocall.’

Everyone looked at each other. At a formal supper, when a guest calls to cancel, everyone already there must be present. I whispered to Hirum: ‘You know Rat isn’t connected up for direct neural access …’

Max said: ‘As it should be,’ and extended a number of tongues beside the one she’d spoken with. (Have you ever wondered why, just before a group call, everyone drops her eyes?)

We dropped our eyes.

And on all sixes Santine looked up at us, with that side motion of the head one had come to associate with her over two decades: ‘Got home, she declared with one tongue; ‘Got your invitation,’ with another. ‘How kind. I’ll tell you, just so there won’t be any untoward encounters: I’m bringing a woman, Marq. She’s quite strange and from another world. I assume it makes her a positive addition to our number this evening. That’s the sweet. The sour is she’s awkwardly eager to come. It could just as easily be her presence turns out negative. Since I know this is in honour of your offworld friends, I don’t want you to have any unpleasant surprises. Worlds can be small places. I imagine universes don’t
have
to be much bigger. We’ll be there in half an hour.’ She vanished.

We looked up.

I turned towards Egri to mention JoBonnot. But Hatti was repeating: ‘To your food, then. At least that’s all it is. They’re coming. To your food …’ And anyway Egri, with Max beside her, had already started across the court.

‘Come on, Rat,’ I said. ‘Let’s cook!’ We hurried along raised grey paths between freeform statuary jutting in white waters.

5.

Fell in light, wandered in shadow, rose in light …

I walked across the carpet to my desk. ‘You don’t have to do anything. Just relax.’

I glanced back to see Rat drop to the orange nap,
cross-legged, inches from one of the six clawed feet. I squatted by the desk, hooked my fingers under the lowest lip, and swung out the food drawer. In the silvery plastic trays, meat lay on the right, with roots and leaf vegetables to the left. The pink haze of the bactereostatic field shimmered about the glass plates in the corners. ‘Would it bother you if JoBonnot showed up here for dinner?’ I pulled out an upper cutlery drawer and pawed through delicate blades.

‘No.’ Ringed and unringed fingers lay on one another, not meshed. ‘Not here.’

‘Good.’ I pressed the green plates on the drawer edge. Nap retracted into the carpet, leaving a clean, blue surface on which to sit and prepare. ‘Are there any formal dishes you particularly enjoy?’

‘I know the names of some,’ Rat said. ‘They told me about them in the Web. But not what they taste like.’

‘To be sure,’ I said. ‘That’s the Web: tell you the names of famous local concoctions, show you pictures, give you some insight into how they’re made, or even instruction in traditional ways to eat them – only they don’t bother to let you taste, which, after all, is what food is about, no? What in the world can the Thants want now?
I’m
making Hunters’ Beacon,’ which is what I make half the time for formal dinners anyway. I swung the large slicer from its niche. ‘Rat, would you look under the bed – ’

‘– for the food form? Yes.’ Which surprised me. But that
is
the Web. The part of their job they do, they do well. Rat swivelled around, lay back, and wedged himself half under my bed; I heard metal and wood clack and clank. He came out with it: lots of pith and metal dowels bound together with bark cord (and two replacement bonds of ragrope). ‘I will get the base dish too.’

‘Yes …’
of course
, I started to say. ‘Please.’

Rat swung himself back under the bed; and swung out again, gazing not quite quizzically at a dish made more or less of the carved and polished pelvis of a beast who – happily – does not live in this latitude. I watched while he got the central pole into the metal socket in the dish’s centre, saying instructions to myself, but not out loud, because his actions were simply, for me, too fascinating to break the silence.

He looked up.

The sky had gone a blue deep enough to strike his eyes’ glass.

From some remembered diagram, from some Web outprint on ‘culinary customs of the Fayne-Vyalou, southern Velm,’ Rat arranged the racks, then set the dish carefully on the rug. He ran his crystal eyes up the metre high struts.

I started the slicer.

Hunters’ Beacon: a paper-thin ribbon of raw meat, five inches wide and cut so that it folds out to several metres, draped, folded, and looped about the rods of the food form, sprinkled with powders, pieces of root, spices, minerals, acids, and oils, each of which flavours or ferments different portions of it differently, some of which chemically cooks portions of it to various degrees, many of which colour its parts to different hues.

I stood up.

Rat stood up beside me.

‘How does it look?’ I put the oil and acid decanters back on the desk, which hummed, beeped, and swallowed them.

‘Like the picture they showed me.’

‘Let’s hope it fits through the door.’

‘Does it usually?’

‘Always.’ Formal dishes by tradition should take no more than twenty minutes to prepare, though some of
my older parents have been known to lavish an extra three or four. Nobody begrudges them.

Rat asked: ‘Can I carry it?’

When someone has taken the time to learn your customs, you tend to be both surprised and pleased in a proportion that, itself, both surprises and pleases.

‘Sure.’ Rat’s and mine: an exchange thousands of years old between humans, contoured by Velmian life to its particular slant, pitch, meaning. That most formal of exchanges, informed by what we felt for each other, lost all formality. ‘Thanks.’

6.

Hunters’ Beacon? Cactus curls, hot and cold pulps and piths, rainbow foam, of course calla berries (plunged in boiling broth to split their pale skins for evening), lichen chokes marinated in Beetlesblood (the name of a wine imported from the north), racks of worm – pickled, poached, or pounded flat and fluted – vine strips shaved with the curlings dipped in sundry flavoured oils …

‘The Thants are here!’ Bucephalus lolloped between Rat and me towards where her own offering for the evening – tall sparoria leaves, rolled and shredded at the tenderer ends, surrounded by crocks of spiced yogurts – stood on the spidery previewing table.

Large Maxa and Sel’v came in through the small doors. Max unfurled her wings and beat them. The waters stilled around the crystal clutch.

Large Maxa announced: ‘Who comes to visit this run with a history of monotony in saltiness, bitterness, sweetness, sourness, …?’ Humans have five basic flavours that become smell without perceptual hitch. Evelmi have twelve basic tastes and no nasal-based olfactory sense –
though they can detect, with some tongues, even a molecule or two lingering on the air. Rat, beside me, moved his lips to ghost the nineteen words covering the basic twelve Large Maxa intoned.

Sel’v announced: ‘Come from a federation rich as our own, yet whose flavours present themselves in different order, noon to noon: Alsrod, Nea, Fibermich, George, Eulalia, Clearwater, and Thadeus, touching tongues and feet to the stream of Thant, flowing towards the stream of Dyeth, contouring the currents like shell whorls.’

Then, around the central mirrors, the two-storey-high wall mural began to bubble. Floor fans blew away fumes as one mural, then the mural beneath it, cleared. Pictorial layer after pictorial layer melted off.

Ahead, first Small Maxa, then V’vish, then Shoshana’s friend (with Shoshana beside her, a hand on her haunch) picked up their offerings from the previewer and began to walk about the hall, while Sel’v and Maxa repeated the invocation.

The last mural bubbled, reticulated, ran, and dripped away from darkness.

Through swinging doors by the dim crystal column, not waiting for the ragged meltings to be sucked into the floor grate, the colourful privacy cloud that hid Thadeus Thant came up, stopping now and starting.

‘… a history of monotony in saltiness, bitterness…’

Behind was one of grey metal. It paused at the diminishing threshold. Then whoever was inside the cloud stepped over. And I remembered the aluminium circles that had hung about Alsrod, now in flight about (certainly) her. Beside them, jewels. Jewels swarmed and glittered about someone as certainly Eulalia – since she was the only Thant who wore them.

‘… present themselves in different order…’

Rat picked up the Hunters’ Beacon from the preview
table. The dish against his stomach, his great hands either side on the bone handles, we walked out into the room. With the metre-high rack before him, on and about which the food hung, I wondered at his view through, and walked beside him among others holding their racks and skewers and dangling hooks of food.

‘… who comes to visit this run with a history …’

From the dark patio a glittering cloud came forward. I assumed the swarm of green foil was Nea – and the black glitter just behind her to the right was Fibermich, because the other cloud off to the left, a storm cloud (billowing mists, rushing droplets flickering within, pearling the humid grey or looping through three-quarters of a rainbow) must have been Clearwater.

‘Odd,’ I said to Rat. ‘Thadeus usually wears some sort of privacy apparatus, but this is the first time the others have.’ Among Vizakar, Clent, Vol’d, walking in from the terrace to follow the guests of honour, I saw, coming over the cleared limen, George Thant, her veined arms brazen and folded, her temples veined and scowling. As our circuit brought us near, I started to speak, but saw, at the same time, just beside her, Santine.

Anticipating ominous Jo, I flinched. But the tall woman who came up with Santine was not the one we’d left her with in the g’gia. ‘Marq Dyeth.’ She extended both hands.

‘Japril,’ I said. ‘Honestly, you are not whom I expected to see here.’ I took them, squeezed them.

‘But I am here.’ She wore some seven formal body jewels of a sombre grey and stunning quality that is the way the Web does things. ‘Actually.’ Her sunburst of office hung above her right shoulder, its rays rotating slowly, like another body jewel, too bright and too gaudy – which is also the Web.

‘You know Rat of course.’ I turned to George, who
had stopped, still glowering, two steps off. ‘And this is Thant –’

As I spoke, George’s metallic skin began to shiver, to shatter, and brass flecks swirled out and about, obscuring her like fire gnats at Iirianiset by the Hyte. In a rising chitter of flake clicking flake, she strode away.

‘What was that?’ Japril asked with the amiability of the interworld traveller used to the vagaries of interworld manners, where neither insult nor compliment should be assumed unless you have it in writing.

‘George Thant,’ I explained, ‘one of the evening’s guests of honour.’

‘Ah,’ said Santine, who had just turned on three legs from talk with someone else (which she finished up with another tongue while she said to us): ‘So I
have
brought you an old friend after all. Universes
are
small, no matter how big worlds are. Marq, how are your aging parents? But I shall see in a moment.’

‘Santine,’ I said, ‘you’ve met my friend, Rat Korga.’

At which Santine reared up on two legs. ‘Rat Korga!’ she cried, just as if this were a first meeting – which is the way of formal affairs. ‘What wonderful flavours must be deployed about that Hunters’ Beacon. You look ancient! May I take a turn with you around the hall as you display your friend’s offering and we leave these two to talk?’

‘Yes,’ Rat said.

At which Santine went back down on all sixes, frowned a moment, then raised her forelegs. ‘You are exceptional! Direct, clear, a unique flavour around which all complexities clarify! I marvel. Come.’ Santine put a foreclaw under the dish’s bottom, to relieve him of a kilogram or two of its seven or eight kilograms’ weight, and began to walk away, perfectly in step so as not to upset the food – a skill it takes a good six weeks’ practice to achieve,
sometime back at age thirteen or fourteen, or twenty-three or twenty-four, depending on whether you’re a six-limbed or four-limbed creature. For a moment I watched them and loved my world. ‘Japril,’ I said, turning back, ‘why are you here?’

‘Didn’t Rat tell you I was coming? He knew, you know. Ynn and Marta are waiting outside. But we thought it would be better if only one of us showed up in vivo. Though Ynn is just wild about your place here. I practically had to restrain her. We didn’t know anything about the party, other than that it was for some offworlders. We don’t know anything about their allegiances and we don’t care. But if they’re from one of those worlds with select unlimited space travel, such folk can get awfully paranoid if too many high-ranking Web officials just happen to be on the welcoming committee. I’ve seen it happen before, and we aren’t here to make problems.’

I laughed. ‘I’m afraid you’ve got it. They do have unlimited space-fare on their own world. Actually, we’re wondering why
they’re
here. Two of them showed up … yesterday, I guess it was. And now the entire stream has come torrenting down on us.’

‘Ah,’ said Japril and touched my arm with a complicitous sigh that, from past years, I knew meant little.

‘Was Rat
supposed
to tell me you were coming?’ I paused. ‘But then, I didn’t ask him.’

Japril sighed. ‘I see you’ve learned a lot about our tall friend in twenty-nine hours – I dare say Rat’s learned a lot about you too. Shall we take a turn around the hall?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She looked at me a moment, then laughed. ‘Well, it’s good to see you both, again and together. Come.’

We moved through the hall, passing relatives, friends, Thants conspicuous in their clouds.

‘All those people outside. Your guests of honour this evening must be quite something.’

‘The Thants? Oh, they come to visit perhaps twice a year. Usually only a dozen or so people come to watch – mostly those intending to take a vaurine tour of some other world who want to see what an offworlder looks like – in vivo.’