Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (12 page)

‘They didn’t say,’ I said.

We turned another corner.

So she said: ‘This will take you back where you want to go.’ Then, with only the goodwill and self-confidence people can show who know for sure they are largely liked by lots of women, she said: ‘A whole world …!’ Then she made a funny little hand motion (which, I suspect, would have meant the same as if I’d shaken my head) and turned away.

Broad, breezy, full of detours, underpasses, and overhangs, the hallways I walked back down to ground level through were an allegory of the informative complexities that Free-Kantor both was and was made for.

And the overload hum was
still
going on!

That I’ve
never
known to happen. Information overload in a major GI sorting system is something that’s supposed
to stop after a second or two, maybe ten at the very most, certainly no more than ten minutes. This jam finally concluded with a sudden burst that brought me up short over the large red and blue plastic panels of the water fountain where I’d just bent to drink, with the declaration:

In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, ‘she’ is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of ‘woman’. The ancient, dimorphic form ‘he’, once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term
man
, pl.
men
), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of ‘she’, during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to.

Which is to say, on Nepiy ‘he’ meant exactly what it did on my own home world or, indeed, here, at Kantor, far off it.

But somehow during the overload, the question had become misfiled or misplaced in my own mind, so that for a moment I felt as if I were being given the answer to a perfectly irrelevant query instead of what, an hour before, I’d asked.

The disorientation, even more than an hour of oppressive hum from the overload, completely struck me away from the feeling that, I realized as it ceased, was probably the reason why I’d come to Free-Kantor in the first place, braving all her inconveniences: here I was in the centre of the night – which now, while the water bobbled slowly over the huge, plastic sheets, changed to the conviction that, lost in darkness eternal, I was (at least for the moment) nowhere at all!

One of my earliest memories –

But I must interrupt to ask: does the above disorientation and estrangement return me to this early moment in the mode of terrified retreat, or do I come to it through a broad and relaxed sense of disinterested aesthetic contrast? Both terror and aesthetics no doubt fuel memory to spear night and time to that morning thirty (standard) years before, but in what form, combination, interplay? Perhaps the answer is in the account itself. Or is it likely that women are just more complex than can be made out by starlight alone?

– the memory: crawling the soft nursery loam between the furry bodies of my schoolmates, some of whom were beginning to get dark scales on their backs; being licked a lot and occasionally licking (though it struck me even then as silly), I wondered at all those tongues that spoke so much better than mine but said such silly things: ‘The Never will you taste like a shell or good either!’ laughter, and this is sun, and this is sand …’

(How many dozen evelm playwrights have used the speech of the nursery to lend poetry, poignance, and whimsy to politics and passion?) Crawl a little. Sniff a claw (or a hand); sit back and laugh. Listen. Look. Crawl. For all our world, I suppose we looked – as real adults of both species are always pointing out – like innumerable
miniatures rehearsing the movements that will go into future homework
₃
along the corridors of some shadowed run, trough to trough, statue to statue. Finally I got to an area where a naked (like me) human (like me) male (like me) was kneeling in the dirt. Through the leaves above the nursery’s plastic roof, Iiriani light dappled the unfamiliar figures. Differences between us? Well, the child was two years or so older than I, and at that age such seems an eternity of wisdom and power. The hair was yellow and smooth. (Mine: rough and nappy, the colour of wet sand.) The face was round, with bright brown eyes not deep at all in the friendly face. (Mine: the lightest tan, they peer from non-epicanthic caves.) As I watched, he – and I can say that honestly now – dug up handful after handful of dirt. I remember thinking how pale and strong his hands were. Perhaps six? Maybe seven? Myself, I couldn’t have been more than five.

The child was an appalling nail-biter, which is a habit humans can have and evelmi, as far as my experience of their claws go, cannot. The dirt had darkened his knuckles and put a black line about the wrecks of those nails, harried back from the grubby crowns towards cuticles that had thickened in defence against even more gnawing. He looked up and smiled.

I smiled back and watched, fascinated, while he patted and pawed the hulk of some marvellous sand castle to shape. At that age, I did not know that at one time perhaps a fifth of the human race had such pale skins and such coloured and textured hair – and were called caucasian, nor that over the six thousand worlds today well over half have such marvellous eyes as his, once called mongolian. The other children, some human, some evelm, whispered and gambolled around us …

Sometimes I think I watched him only a moment; sometimes I think I stared at him an age.

Then: a black claw descended, like the huge limb of some mechanized sculpture falling into activity.

The youngster looked up to grin at some hovering parent (like mine): rough and grainy where they emerged from the bark-black hide, becoming metal smooth as they curved to needle tips, iron-coloured talons spoke only to me of distance but not of specific origin.

The child reached up.

Claw and hand grappled –

I couldn’t have watched that juncture more than a moment. Even then I knew the tussle of a parent picking up a child to go off somewhere into the city – home, for me.

But for him? Really, then, I knew little of two kinds of flesh joined there, or of the disparate organic body chemistries that, some places on my world, sunder the species and at others are the parameters about which everything that is human and everything that is evelm are in play.

They were gone.

I was left, amidst the other children, furred or fleshed, fingered or clawed, to tell myself endless stories over the next years as to why, for a few hours, that child had been there. The most obvious answer? He and a parent had been passing through Morgre and the child had simply been left off at the nursery to play a while. But not a year standard has gone by when, in some lone moment, I haven’t enhanced on some recomplication of a human child’s and a black-scaled beast’s adventuring together across my world, during which, momentarily, I glimpsed an instant of it: their joined hands within a strange nursery under leaf-shadowed light.

2

A grandmother of mine was an Industrial Diplomat. So was one of my mothers. But though two of my female siblings share the vocation, I am the only male of my ripple to take on Industrial Diplomacy as my primary profession – a profession
₁
, I sometimes slip into thinking of as the Dyeths’ traditional calling now for three of our seven waves. And suddenly this memory – recent, adult, insistent, yet trivial:

Walking across the green terraces, home from some job
₁
or other, both eager to see them and uneasy over the prospect of all that food and fellow feeling, as the oestern court’s black and silver wall rose on its humming treads to reveal some visiting aunt, who turned ponderously behind the Dyethshome amphitheatre’s ornate railing, a long fork waving from one midclaw, to call first with one tongue, then with another: ‘But of course!’ going from vibrant basso to treble: ‘I know you! You’re one of my marvellous little human relatives! Now you’re …?’ and couldn’t remember my name to save herself.

But with this interruption, among all possible streaming memories, I find myself turning to another, again, earlier.

The true possibility of my becoming an Industrial Diplomat (Marq Dyeth, auntie! Marq Dyeth!) no doubt goes back at least to the year I spent offworld with my grandmother Genya. Well under one per cent of the population of any world will ever set foot on any other. Vaurine tours satisfy the wanderlust of the rest. Still,
we
could; and
she
thought it was a Good Thing. So we went a star away and I waited on the wet moon, called Senthy, of a gas giant that, itself, had no name but only a number, while Genya snarled and unsnarled herself from the Web,
and I mooned about the rust-blotched plates of the administrative hangars’ tall doors outside the new spaceport, mumbling over lessons fed directly into my mind by a voice with a strange accent and prompted by visual aids – the image of some locally engineered amphibious kangaroo stopping you on the crumbly black path – whose colours always seemed too intense for the green clouded horizon against which they were projected.

A year later we were back on Velm, in the Fayne-Vyalou, at Morgre, Genya happy to be home and angry at the Web policies that had made the return so precipitate; and I settled into a more usual routine – usual for someone like me in a situation like mine on my particular world. In my particular place on it. Only now I’d had a year to see how unusual, in universal terms, my usual could be. Certainly such knowledge ripened me for the memory I wish to recount:

Twelve years old, then, and studying with the tracers, I find this persists as strongly as the memory from the nursery. An apprentice, I was assigned to accompany some older cadets down into one of Morgre’s lower interlevels. I remember cables moving above us. I remember echoing breaths and wide wings. I remember mica glimmering in the rock walls under the burning purple of the shoulder lamps.

A manufacturing union had used the upper shelves of this space for storing several tons of corrosive muck that should have been carried out to the desert months before. Turned out to be more corrosive than they’d thought. Next thing, the report arrived that it had dripped, dripped, dripped, trickled, then poured down through the eaten-away container bottoms and shelving on to some V-lifts, ratchet diggers, and transport sleds stored below. Most of them had been ruined, and tracers
₁
, roused from their sleep before dawn, had come in, tasted,
tested, and foamed the place with blacklime to neutralize the corrosion. Now our group of tracers
₂
, cadets (and one apprentice: me), were coming to dig out what had to be dug and send what had been tagged, with little green plastic discs, swinging off on the salvage lines thrumming in the dark. Two males, both of us human, were among the winged females and neuters that day. I guess people notice such things, but where do you learn it’s not necessary to comment on them?

Not, apparently, where the other human male was from. This one? About twenty-five – possibly thirty. It was certainly old enough to me, and the behaviour was that which I would later come to associate with many humans from my world’s north. A tracer
₁
, this male had taken a temporary job
₂
here while travelling in the south. Oh, there was much of making it clear that our friend’s sexual tastes were for the greater winged neuters, with much bantering apology to the smaller, gorgeously winged females, allowing how, on the part of our world
she
came from (Katour?), interracial heterosexuality was, indeed, the most prevalent perversion; but
she
was different and liked them big … at the same time, demonstrating much parental affection for me, as a young human: hugs, jokes, her rough black gloves with their simulated steel claws on my shoulder a lot. (She’d had scales set permanently into the flesh of her muscular back, which, as I had never seen that before, I found both intriguing and mildly repulsive.) Boisterous, bumptious, and – to perhaps a third of the women there – charming in one way or another. Still, as far as anything I might have considered true intercourse there was nothing for me.