Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (52 page)

The motion stopped.

The music died.

One and another of us, we looked at each other, then up at the swollen star. Over half the women on the ship, as I recall, were not human – but I don’t recall which species they were. One – who was – looked at me with a small, cramped laugh: ‘It
is
large!’

My own laugh was probably no less cramped.

We were the first two to rise from our benches. For about fifteen minutes we walked to this side of the chamber, then that side, looking up at the purple, whose diffraction indeed was like no planetary atmosphere I’ve ever been in, now out and down and around at the star into which Iiriani, not to mention Iiriani-prime, might both have fallen without a noticeable splatter.

One and another, people began to leave.

Eventually I was left with only one other woman. She had a small steel-mesh disc among the fleshy folds of
reddish skin (darker than Aurigae) which, just as I realized it was a human-speech translation device, began to talk:

‘Were you at all offended that they gave you the analogic information in Solar Systemic terms, human?’

I smiled. ‘Myself, I’m much more comfortable on Sygnstyle ships than on Family ones – true. But I suppose I just took it as a somewhat chauvinistic habit left over from the dawn of space travel. GI converts it into whatever terms you’re most familiar with, anyway.’

‘An intriguing strategy,’ the bland and inhumanly self-assured voice addressed me while fold on fold thrilled and rippled. ‘I spent six years on Old Earth – at least a planet
called
Earth. I was at North China University.’

I did
not
make the standard comment I would have on my own world about universities being a wonderful way to travel. ‘University life always seemed a fine way to age.’

‘Ah, yes. One does seem to age there. Talk of Solarcentric chauvinism is frequently a good opening conversational gambit for humans of a certain Familiar orientation, I find.’

‘Is it?’ My world was a Sygn world; but then she was not human. ‘It seems somehow strange to me to talk of Solarcentricism before something like that.’ I gestured towards the great sun.

‘How true,’ returned the measured, featureless voice. ‘I would chuckle in amused agreement, but the laughter switches of my translator have been malfunctioning for the past six hours. You understand.’

‘Certainly,’ I said. And somehow felt much more comfortable. ‘Now, myself, I’ve never been to an Earth.’

‘And here I would laugh with surprise if I could!’ the alien exclaimed. ‘How provincial of me, to assume, just because you are human …’

‘Oh, I’m sure there is a flavour about all my movements and manners that gives you a taste of my origins.’

‘Flavour? Ah, yes. Myself, I have twelve different faculties that you would call senses. But the ones you humans call sight, taste, and smell are not among them. Oh, you have no idea how much difficulty that gave me on your planet – your racial origin planet, that is. (If, indeed, it was!) At your university. Eventually though, through trial and error, I was able to develop quite a complex algorithm for translation purposes. I’m very proud of it, really. It’s never failed me yet.
Your
binocular vision, I know, can actually perceive directly the spherical solidity of that great globe. I can’t, not at this distance.’

I looked out at the sun again. Yes, the parallax of my minuscule eyes was enough to register its stupendous curvature. ‘As a matter of fact I can. It does curve away. Tell me, which sense are you perceiving it with?’

‘I? How polite of you! It’s a kind of aural rendition that requires the light to be translated into ultrasound waves. Indeed, it sounds like one of my own home world’s dawns, only much vaster, harmonious, resonant.’

I looked up at the purplish immensity that was all space for half a light-year, but which, from here, seemed smaller than the star that filled it. ‘It does remind me of a strange and alien morning.’

‘In the light of such a sun, one would think it should always be noon. Yet morning is certainly the way it strikes me. Do you agree?’

I nodded, wondering at the vagaries of translation. ‘To me,’ I said, ‘it seems at once both bitter and sweet; it speaks to me of concatenations of tastes as eccentric as mace, vinegared lichen, and powdered alum served three hours after sunset at the very moment when the musicians cease to play – it casts me out of myself, then hurls me back like a suddenly encountered odour from childhood
that, as I name it, I only then realize I have mistaken for some other, and I am forced to contemplate all the possibilities that, in their shadings and subtleties, must be as varied as the red and black variegations on that star itself, and thus I am struck with the notion of something so large it might as well be infinite, so old it might as well be eternal.’

‘Precisely,’ said that steel translator’s voice for this creature who possibly possessed none of her own. She started to drift along the rail, rippling. ‘That is precisely the way it sounds to me. I could not have put it better,’ leaving me to wonder what, precisely, precision was on the other side of that steel disc. That she and I had both found something matutinal to contemplate, for whatever our vastly different reasons, in that huge fire, seemed the most stupendous of cosmic accidents and was, finally, where all real wonder lay.

To arrive at dawn on a world where you have departed night-time (or daytime – no matter) from some spot on that same world is to enter a welter of possibilities. I recall my departure from the moonlit shore and, an hour later, my arrival at the morning Flame Fields of Rhyss’kelton where, beyond the great ceramic baffles, the flickering light darkens the sky into a parody of night, even when their tiny sun had lifted above the broken horizon. As I walked along the covered arches that wormed through the air from one governmental institution to the next, I looked down over the rail, through the clear wall at the lavid fissures a hundred metres below, hot with copper and rose. But every dawn-time flicker over the artfully bland facades I could read as a sign whose meaning had been given me by my previous nights, days, evenings on the world itself, signs I knew, even if I had hopelessly mislocated them on this particular
fragment of it, signs that would adjust and rearrange as the day and days went on: a situation that allowed morning to be a beginning by anchoring it to a succession of days and nights – an arrival inscribed all over by an obsessive security that a person who has lived on a single world can never really know, because she has never been without it.

But have you ever arrived
on
a world at dawn?

The ship orbits, usually for an hour or three, before landing. As one watches in the binocs (that the better ships provide to tape over your eyes) you can see the world, this one orange and green with hydrocarbon soups, that one blue and white with oxidized hydrogen broths, another grit grey, still another dust brown, but all, whatever their dominant colour, scythed away, as one circles, with night.

If your mind turns in such aubadinal directions, you become intensely aware how arbitrary a concept dawn is.

First of all, it is all choice: to arrive on a world in the morning is a decision completely at the whim of those conscious priorities that run from pragmatics to aesthetics. Power and desire are both given voice, each allowed their necessary pages in the decisionary print-out.

The tumble – where they tell you
not
to look – feels, most of it, not like the soar through space, but rather like a jarring, an inadvertent jiggling, that would shake up some container in an earthquake, lodged at a mine’s bottom.

And on the vast majority of worlds, when you emerge from that ill-bounded structure, the ship, you are (more or less) underground.

Sets of identification crystals spin in invisible reading fields between tall worn elements; a moving roadway, which I realized to my astonishment from the hum underfoot, was propelled by
mechanical
rollers; and I emerged
from a round kiosk in what at first looked like some horizon-to-horizon rippling mirror: water, but it was rare that I had seen so much of it at once. Only a few centimetres deep, I was later told. And here and there lay the purple and green algae-patches harvested over the grand-paddy with those tall cranes, most, at this hour, immobile across the silver flats. To my left the sky was dark. To my right, red washed through the overcast. On a metre-wide ridge of wet gravel ribboning away, some women in heavy boots, bulbous gloves, and tarnished metallic suits crunched up. Most of them looked at me – one or two smiled, as if in acknowledgement of my offworld dress. (Save my slippers, I was naked.) They came by me into the kiosk, which fed into a local transport as well as the ten-kilometre shuttle from the spacefield. Were they coming from a work shift? Were they going to one? To arrive on a world at dawn, despite GI’s preliminary scatter of information, is to read the whole roster of signs you are used to for morning over the expanse of what you see, and at the same time see those meanings start to transpare as one begins to see the possibilities – a world of possibilities – clear behind them.

To leave one spot on a world at dawn when your destination is another spot on that same world is to be assured coherent passage ahead into day or back into night. The aerial city of Datchog consists of fifty-five giant condenapts hung between towering pylons rising six hundred metres above the mist-filled canyons. The inhabitants still talk of the collapse of ’37, when one of the huge structures tore loose from its moorings to fall against furze-blotched rock, killing more than a hundred-fifty thousand. At such heights, dawn arrives before it does on the misty crags below. I waited on the great mirrored terraces for my flyer, an inverted image foot to foot with me, where, on another surface, I would have
merely stood at the base of some elongated right shadow. From time to time I would go to the rail and gaze down at the shadow-pearled rocks which had not yet vaulted into day, till vertigo drove me away and I retreated to the cushioned area on which rested those of us waiting to shuttle a fifth of a world away – to a desert cut through by a famous river of liquid galenium beneath whose shore in a room not unlike my own lived a solitary hermit-philosopher, musician, and crafter of miniature starmaps. Her work would allow me to complete this particular mission
₁
. Travel engenders a certain anxiety, no matter what assurances overlay it. Yet in that part of the mind where signs both of anxiety and of surety lodge their conceptual referents, the coherence of the world to which travel is limited allows whatever anxiety or anticipations you have to
have
direction, to keep course and discourse, to be.

But leaving a
world
at dawn? A job
₁
about to begin breaks up into little jobs
₂
, which, as they are finished, cohere into a job
₁
completed. My green-windowed conveyor lurched through sub-city caverns along old tracks. Outside the purple light strips set into the wet rock suddenly glowed a soft, vivid red, lighting the backs of my knuckles where I held the support bar – the sign, on that part of the world, for morning. The tattoos on my hands, which, on almost all parts of that world, one had to wear simply to maintain decorum, would dissolve and vanish with the first round of preparatory drugs I would take at the spaceport, GI had assured me back on my arrival. This job, had taken me to half a dozen spots among the most populous sectors of the planet, that only seemed one to me because of the three-quarters-standard gravity: hot desert inns with great plastic windows looking out over grey sands and up at a sky never lighter than
star-pricked indigo; dry ice canyons, roofed with hundred-year-old ribbed and riveted plates, where day and night were at the whim of the controller illuminating the greater and lesser blue and yellow globes floating above; modern, freeform architectural compounds set on semi-airless rock, cassetted to look and feel and sound and smell like the blue-veined, dim, and somewhat ammonia-laden atmosphere that, apparently, the last batch of human colonists, fifty years before, had called home.

As my conveyance turned down the dim, craggy h’Hol Karven, the light went from dawn red to daytime white (morning was a great deal shorter in some parts of this world than in others). As we passed the stainless steel gridwork rising over the rockface, which I had heard praised in six different geosectors of this world, I considered, still awash in morning thoughts, though the leisurely day about me had begun, my coming departure. Alone, borne in metal, plastic, and ceramic, towards the spaceport, I realized that in the brief months I had stayed here, I had made friends whose insights into my psychology had altered my life: whose sudden and affectionate advances had moved, in that society far more liberal than any I’d ever known, into a comradely sexuality that had first frightened me and then freed me to deal far more realistically with that of my own world’s rooms and runs. I had read tractati written here of a complexity to reorganize my whole view of woman’s place in an expanding universe, eaten meals of a simplicity that had made me learn things about my human tongue that, on Velm, I might never have discovered. And why do I tell you about leaving it, and not the life-changing simplicities that were the world itself? Because that morning departure, fifteen or seventeen years ago, is all, really, I can name of it. The rest is only its synopsized results. Since its cities and its people had no names (only its
streets and geosectors bore labels), in a year’s time or less I could not even recall the
number
of that world!

To leave one part of a world in order to visit another is to indulge in a transformation of signs, their appearances, their meanings, that, however violent, still, because of the coherence of the transformative system itself, partakes of a logic, a purely geographical order, if not the more entailed connections lent by ecological or social factors: here they do it one way, there they do it another – with no doubt as to the identity of the antecedents of both ‘its’. But to leave a world, and to leave it at dawn, thus delaying all possibility of what one might learn in a day, is to experience precisely the problematics of that identity at its most intense: to see that identity shatter, fragment, and to realize that its solidity was always an illusion, and that infinite spaces between those referential shards are more opaque to direct human apprehension than all the star-flooded vacuum. ‘To leave a world, you have to forget so much of it,’ is the truism, if not the cliché, constant among the workers of the Web, or indeed, among any other world-bounding profession
₁
. To leave a world at dawn, however, is to know how much you can want to remember; and to realize how much, because of the cultural and conceptual grid a world casts over our experience of it, we are victims to that truth against all will, once we tear loose from it into night.