Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (48 page)

‘… reduced to animals who copulate with animals, call animals their sisters and mothers …’

‘… so old,’ which was Santine. ‘All of you, so marvellously old.’ Somewhere between Maxa and myself, she brought forward her own spit in her foreclaw, her dark and scaly head, with its luminous gill-ruff, heavy with tongues poised for with compliments. ‘Really, you, I, all of us are looking perfectly ancient …’

‘… not as if they don’t acknowledge it themselves. Our way is older, purer, human. And animal as they are and act, they know it …’

I’m not sure where social discomfort interfaces with social panic. Perhaps some sign of distress in Santine – or Vol’d, who had followed her, or Mammam’m, who, I saw as I moved around the gathered Thants, had apparently been standing just behind them, her own unrecognized spit extending only centimetres behind Nea’s right ear, still as a hunter poised for the shot – produced a paralytic astonishment at this incomprehensibility. It made me step even further around and actually thrust my spit into the glittering confusion of Thadeus’s cloud.

‘… reminds me of the stories of our shepherds up at the equator. Those little furry creatures they drive about the slopes? Well, you know the jokes about the male shepherds and their favourite fur-balls in the pack …’

Sudden as some contrivance governed by a timer, precise laughter exploded from all six Thants. I looked
from one to the other. Before Alsrod, who was speaking, another delectably set spit hung.

‘… but our equatorial herders at least have the decency to be ashamed of their indiscretions …’

I followed the spit down to the dull claws of my mother Sel’v (the travelling composer
₁
), who, now that she’d) joined us, straining forward with food, let go the faintest sigh of confusion. I saw her gum ridges start to arch, then go taut.

‘… eat and procreate, eat and – but one can’t even say that. Not only the males with the females, but the males do it with males, the females do it with females, within the race, across the races – and what are we to make of neuters – as if they had not even reached the elementary stage of culture, however ignorant, where a family takes its appropriate course …’

There were at least ten, now, circling them, spits extended, straining towards faces and mouths that refused any converse other than among themselves. There was another fusillade of precise hilarity. We circled, waiting for them to taste, refuse, disdain, even insult. But all they did was ignore. I moved aside from V’vish and bumped shoulders with Shoshana. Both leaned forward among the others that had gathered, unable to retreat in the paralysis of breached protocol.

‘… so old …’

‘… so old …’

‘… aging beautifully, really, truly …’

‘… marvellously old …’

Ritual compliments, from worried tongues, at all volumes and timbres, threatened to drown whatever the Thants recited among themselves.

‘… to call them animals, you know – the humans among them, that is – suggests an innocence that, frankly, they don’t warrant …’

‘… criminal then …’

‘… a disease is not innocent, and this equation of unnatural crime with innocence is, in itself, a disease, which can only be cured by the most primitive means: quarantine, fire, prayer …’

Somehow the whole dinner had become polarized between Rat, who would accept anything offered and – since manners demanded one not feed the same person twice – the Thants, who, accepting nothing, had become a dam against which all must eventually break. The circle around the Thants thickened, with siblings and guests. Now Alyxander, lower lip between her teeth, extended cactus curls. Now Black Lars lifted her midclaws again and again in anxiety, with a foreclaw extending her spitted sarb-bulb one more centimetre than politeness would tolerate towards George’s bronze lips.

‘… their own bad smell, where they sniff it out in those elongated troughs of depravity that run through the land, where the females are allowed to be as licentious as the males …’

We are slaves of custom. No one knows that better than an ID, who is no less a slave than anyone else. My shoulder ached from holding out my arm. I moved my leaves now to Nea, now to Alsrod, now to Fibermich, now to Clearwater, trying to think of something to do. I had the vaguest notion that if I listened to what they were saying, I might understand what they were doing. But though I heard their words accurately enough, I understood nothing. Because each notion I arrived at was arrived at in desperation, it crumpled on desperate contradictions. A memory of Rat – I suddenly felt the first impulse to forsake custom, throw down my spit, and return to him. What halted me, I think, was that I now saw, among those trying to donate some food or flavour or nourishment to our guests, Egri. She did not appear
upset. She held her offering out with the perfect self-assurance that, somehow, good manners … a sureness that if only the others would cease a moment, perhaps – must prevail. And watching her, my mother and mentor, she seemed the most preposterous of us all.

I would run to Rat –

And Rat’s hand took my arm. I jerked around to see. The hand – bare – moved up to my shoulder. He glanced at me, ordinary-eyed, then looked back at the Thants. His ringed hand, on the long handle of his spit, was about six inches off the place where decades of claws and fingers had worn the rough-out leather handle smooth. With no lean in it at all, his presentation stance was as absurdly awkward as his early moments with a radar-bow. I glanced at Egri again. Somehow her self-confidence and grace, coupled with his clumsiness and ignorance, put parentheses around the whole range of painful unknowing, so that again, here in my own home, I felt as alien as I ever had at any distant revel, cultures and light-years away.

‘Marq, this is terrible! What are they doing … !’ which was Japril at my shoulder, her new spit again extended. ‘What do you think they’re – ’

Which is when the shadows and winds from Large Maxa’s wings beat up beside and behind me. ‘Marq –?’

I turned.

Max caught my shoulders in her claws. ‘Marq, please, you must – ’

‘What – ’

‘Just come. No, this is beyond all –’ and tugged me, as if I were some six-legged pup, across the floor, so that I did drop my spit. ‘Max, what …?’ I honestly thought she was talking about the Thants.

Once, I got in a look back. At least half our visitors were circling our oblivious guests of honour, awkward and unacknowledged offerings hanging on the ends of their long forks. The other half seemed to be standing about behind them, bewildered among the fountains and furnaces or under the cables, chains, and dangling instruments that had been summoned from floor and ceiling.

Rat came behind me. Japril dashed up after him.

‘Outside,’ Max explained. ‘The crowds! We have to
do
something!’

Kelso, V’vish, Hatti, and Jayne were waiting for us, Japril and Rat came too.

‘People will be crushed,’ Max went on. ‘They’re already pressed up against the walls!’

‘Shall we open the doors?’ Jayne demanded. ‘Perhaps that will take some of the pressure off and let the ones in front get free.’

‘But if the ones in back think we’ve opened Dyethshome to the public,’ Large Maxa bellowed, ‘there’ll be a surge forward – ’

Somehow, with the private catastrophe of the Thants, we had all but lost connection to that tall, barefooted human beside me, in the rough cloth pants chained low about his hips, the thick fingers of one hand heavy with jewels, the jaw cratered with old wounds below his green, unstable eyes, about whom this public catastrophe centred.

We moved towards the confusion of mirrors, as though by looking at the fragmented conglomerate of our own
reflections we might see through to a way of ending the confusion outside.

‘The crowd is still growing, Marq,’ Japril whispered. ‘I just got a call from Marta, and Ynn said …’

Then there was no hand on my shoulder, which made me look off. Korga was walking towards the transparent column by the door. He squatted before Bybe’t’s irregular black casting, the pedestal of leaves, rocks, and wings breaking about geometric uncertainties and topologic singularities, to gaze up where metres of misted crystal rose to the capital’s folds and spikes –

Suddenly the glass glowed.

Within, bubbles of light.

Bubbles fell and rose.

Rat now stood to gaze. Light lay on the floor about him, quivered on his rings, devilled his shadow’s edge behind him.

Kal’k started forward. I pushed past Hatti to overtake her, hearing behind:

‘What did –?’

‘Did Rat turn it –?’

‘How –?’

As I came up, the speaker, in the mouth of a gaping dust-skate at shin level, asked:

‘Who are you?’

I had never heard my seven-times great-grandmother’s voice, but I had read enough descriptions of its velvet body, its scrap-silver nap.

‘You wear the rings of Vondramach Okk, and …’ In the pause, I thought perhaps Gylda Dyeth’s synapse casting had failed. But light coursed on within the irregular transparency: ‘And there are people gathered outside in numbers I have only seen the likes of during a visit from Vondramach herself. Who are you? What do you want here? Why have you wakened me?’

I reached Rat’s side, reached up to hold Rat’s high, hard shoulder.

‘I am Korga, the porter, Rat. And I come from –’

‘Rat,’ I whispered, ‘how did you turn that on?’

‘– Rhyonon. But that world is now destroyed.’

I said: ‘Rat, you’re not connected up for neural access. How did you activate that?’ Then suddenly I thought to ask: ‘Mother Dyeth, what will we do about all those people outside? They’re going to hurt themselves, if many of them haven’t already.’

‘And they’re here to see
this
one?’ my seven-times great-grandmother demanded.

‘As far as we can tell.’ (Japril moved up beside me.) ‘That’s certainly what it looks like.’

‘It happens with certain guests of honour.’ Somewhere an elderly woman sighed with resigned ire. ‘I assume, from what I see about me, that this is a formal supper and this Rat is our guest …?’

‘This is a formal supper,’ I said. ‘But Rat’s not the guest of honour, Mother Dyeth; only a visitor.’

‘Mmmmm,’ she said, which is a sound I’ve heard many humans make, but none who were born here on Velm. ‘Last time I saw folk gathered outside that way for someone who wore those rings but wasn’t the guest of honour, well … we had an unpleasantness in the north court that I hope, by now, has been forgotten. But I doubt it. So, they’re here to see this one. Have you shown this Rat fellow to them?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We haven’t.’

‘They’re not going to go away until you do,’ Mother Dyeth said. ‘That’s what we always did when hundreds gathered outside to see Vondramach.’

‘This is thousands, Mother Dyeth,’ Japril said, surprising me. ‘Do you think Rat Korga’s presence should be publicly announced?’

‘Hundreds? Thousands? What woman has any concept of the difference between them! But I know that if those good people don’t know for sure Rat Korga is here, rumour must be doing its damnedest.’

‘How do we show them?’ I asked. ‘Should we just open the doors and let people in? There’re already too many for the amphitheatre to hold. I don’t think – ’

‘Do it the way we did it. Activate the walls. That shouldn’t be beyond you.’

‘The walls …?’ One of my mothers, Kelso I think, asked behind me.

‘The multichrome walls. That’s what they’re there for. It’s the trouble with this heap, you know. There’re so many things it can do, nobody can keep track of them from one year to the next.’

‘We’ll have to look it up in the library,’ I said. ‘I’m not really sure even what you mean – ’

‘She means using the projection facilities in the freestanding walls,’ which was little Mima, med-tech
₂
and student of ancient folk theatre. ‘When the audience overflowed the amphitheatre, and they wanted to project the performances to those gathered around the house, they used the multichrome walls.’

‘Oh,’ I said. There’re lots of things that have happened around this place in the last couple of centuries I’ve just never known about.

‘The last time they were used was well over a hundred years ago,’ Mima explained, ‘just before the Bazaret Troupe disbanded.’

‘We still have to go to the library to check the access codes. Nobody’s going to know them after this many – ’

‘I do,’ Mima said.

Maybe that’s why everyone needs students.

‘Japril,’ I said, turning the other way, ‘you said something about public announcements?’

Japril looked very unhappy. ‘You don’t really have much choice. Marta says that from her position the situation looks bad and Ynn says that, from where she is, it looks even worse.’

‘Rat, do you mind if – ’ but realized with him the question was irrelevant. ‘Mima?’

‘Come this way.’ She started across the floor towards the ramp. ‘To the amphitheatre. That’s where you project from.’

‘Come on, Rat.’

We went over small bridges. Alsrod Thant came running up, jangling aluminium discs on chains. ‘Marq, what’s going on? I – ’ Clearwater and Eulalia were behind her. Whatever the reasons for their outrageous behaviour, they had apparently dissolved before curiosity. I wanted to say something, but Rat, Mima, and about six other women (I think Tinjo, I think Santine, among both parents and students) rushed up the ramp with us towards a lot of mirrors.

Our images bloomed about us and fell away. As we came out from the stone arch and down the steps, somebody turned on the lights. The night sky blackened and lost stars. The high walls stood around. ‘Are you sure you know how to work the – ’

‘Oh, yes,’ Mima said. ‘You just stand on the stage, you and Rat – just the way you did when you gave us our orientation session. Only with Rat. One moment – ’ She thought some access code over; along the stage edge tiny traps opened up to reveal black ceramic elements that I vaguely remembered having seen in pictures as a child, but (one) had never known what they were and (two) had just assumed they’d been removed.

Empty seats rose round us in the dark to the walls themselves.