Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (16 page)

And ‘slave’ is one of those words in Arachnia that, amidst a flurry of sexual suggestions, strongly connotes the least pleasant aspects of ‘master’.

But even compared to other spots on Velm, our Sygn retreat here at Morgre was quite modest. Our local Arvin produced no famous mystics, no writers of profound tracts, no multivoiced orators, or even thirty-tongued preachers – and few brooding sermons. But it served as a cultural and social centre for the Morgre area when there was nothing here, beside the Hyte-wr, but a loose
association of labour communes and cooperatives, nestled at the foot of the Myaluths. Still, many of the primitive statues in the Arvin’s meditation gardens, rich with wood (pith, really), metal, and local gemstones decorating the basic plastine forms, made up in invention and passion what they lacked in sophistication: the itinerant evelm (and sometimes human) artists, who travelled from retreat to retreat in those days, leaving a sculpture here or a net-tapestry there as offering for their fare and lodging, had a sense – the best of them – of what would widen a local’s eyes. When the retreat was moved three hundred metres south to make way for the sinking of Morgre proper, only two of the meditation gardens were reconstructed on the new site. (The statuary from the other three is now at Dyethshome.) In my own too infrequent visits to the Arvin, where it currently stands, its pale blue walls set with carved portrait faces, licked over with reddish schist-moss, gazing out on to Morgre’s South Plaza Market, I doubt I’ve ever seen more than six people at a time using either one of the remaining gardens for actual inward-communion. But tradition has it that, in the early days, area meetings were held there in which four or five hundred workers
₂
would come to vote and discuss local and geosector policy and offer replacement ones. Presumably hundreds among them stayed to meditate – though where hundreds might lie down to pray, even in five gardens, always puzzled me, since I could visualize no more than twenty people at a time using the ones they still had.

The seven levels of Morgre were sunk into the scrumbly stones of the Vyalou in 2,588 Web Standard. Its northern edge just touches the three artificial spurs that had been dug off the Hyte. The Myaluths to the west offer substantial protection from the hotwinds that tear over most of three months through the otherwise balmy climate in this
geosector, bringing scalding grit and the stench of acetone all during the season of the pearlbats.

Hotwinds make the above-ground parks and recreational levels of a number of the larger urban complexes further oest and north pretty much a joke. Five hundred kilometres away in Farkit they put out warning signs half an hour before a blow is expected – and
everyone
goes underground. Here in Morgre, because of the Myaluths, with goggles and a good sandsuit, humans for an hour and evelmi for three can actually walk around in one, though it’s not fun.

And in the same year as the sinking of Morgre, on what is occasionally called Dyeth’s Rise, by Whitefalls – one of the three waterfalls the Sygn was able to coax from the underground water springs about here, whose streams join in Morgre’s Central Park, to flow away and finally mingle with the hot oils of the Hyte – at the end of the path of polychrome clays, flanked with topaz cactus, Mother Dyeth, who had just resumed as job
₁
as a foreman at one of the furniture communes and had taken a job
₂
as a spiritual adviser at the Arvin, instructed the great off-world ships and cross-country transports that sidled up beside the already bustling cranes and diggers and crawlers and loaders furiously laying in the underground levels of Morgre complex (and the ships and transports all bore the insignia of Vondramach Okk) to erect the astonishing gift she had been presented with, a gift so large its implication may never really have penetrated to the folk with whom she had worked in this area five years before.

But that’s to get away from Morgre proper and turn to the castle going up – and down – by the waterfall to the east. And though that castle, Dyethshome, is my home, that’s not yet my plan.

3.

Just off Fayne-run, centred in Morgre’s fourth layer down, Dylleaf Crescent has got to be the dingiest street in the city. Up between slanted black columns, high ceilings had once displayed elegant frescoes. But during a long forgotten industrial overflow, a union lower down had requisitioned the roof for storage space, bolting up their ribbed and rickety gondolas. Eventually some of them had been removed. Some had simply been emptied, but still hung there. A lot of the frescoes had come down with them, so that blotches of dirty yellow plaster now patched what was left of the grey, green, and gold.

The street cleaners must have been on the blink again, because facribbons had been trampled into mulch and kicked against the stone walls, too wet and wadded for the air currents to lift and carry towards the waiting grills. (Sometime soon, tracers
₂
would arrive with their wide blades to scrape them away …) I ducked through a stone gate a head too low for me.

And I’m not tall.

But the gate had been put up generations ago when it was just assumed no human would ever live here – though once, on a labour
₂
sabbatical, I’d had my living room only metres away.

In the dusty floor, six limen plates made a hexagon. Overhead, four of the six viewing lights worked, thrusting misty pillars down from the darkness.

I stepped on to one. ‘Santine,’ I called, ‘are you at home?’ (At home my own viewing light wasn’t working so I couldn’t see who was at my plate.) ‘Santine?’

‘Oh, just a second, will you. There …’ and I felt the
sensation that is something like rising but more like falling, in a column of light …

‘So.’ Santine reared up on her hind fours and dropped her black, scaly head to the side. ‘You’re back from gallivanting about the stars and have decided to pay a world-bound friend a visit.’

‘Actually, I’ve been back for three days. But my job
₂
caught me up immediately out at the home and I’ve just only been able to try any new tastes since this afternoon.’

‘Well, come in. Come in, and I’ll find us something interesting to suck on.’

I stepped off the plate on to the grey and blue clays that stretched off to the hedges of silvagorse and on for desolate kilometres towards the middling cliffs. At the horizon was Morgre, in which I had been only seconds before. The city lay, like a toy of girders and plates, dark and miniature in the west. The sky to its left was still copper.

Under indigo air, pole lights stood at half-illumination about the semi-tiers of stone into which Santine’s room was hewn. Out of season, five or six pearlbats flicked at the tallest. Outside on Dylleaf there’d been the warm bellow of the street cleaners; here there was natural breeze.

‘Sit. Sit.’ With bluish claws she plumped a pile of cushions covered by an antique web-work tapestry she’d brought with her from Hysy’oppi in the north, years before I was born. ‘All safe for you. Sit.’

I went over and dropped on the soft seat, while she went to rummage in the white cabinets that stood about the room. ‘So, you folk out in the prestigious rim of the city have decided to pay a visit to the centre. Ah, riches! Ah, poverty!’

‘Oh, come now,’ I said. ‘Someone of your profession
₁
has been many times richer than I five times over.’
Santine was a tracer
₁
, and the exchange was one of the rituals that had grown up here in the south to integrate the human concern for wealth with a culture that had no concept for uneven-distribution-of-exchange-power (so that it took its neuroses out in much more interesting – to humans – ways). ‘I’ve been meaning to pay you a visit ever since I got back. And now I have!’

Santine found one stone on one shelf, licked it, then found another – tried that one. ‘How’re the rest of the worlds in the universe rolling along?’

‘Oh, well enough, I suppose – though a month or so back I was on a world called Nepiy …’ But Nepiy took me to another world that no longer existed and that I didn’t want to talk about. ‘Well,
they
had their problems! But then, why talk about unpleasantnesses here. Popping around the universe the way I do, the only thing that still surprises me is that there’re so many humans in it.’

‘Billions,’ Santine said, picking up a third stone. ‘Over how many worlds? Thousands of worlds, you told me once.’

I leaned my elbows back on the cushions. ‘The truth is, Santine, I don’t have any
real
concept of how a billion differs from a million. Or a thousand. At least in real terms. No human does.’

‘I’ve heard – ’ Santine turned, on her hind legs now, flavour stones on all foreclaws – ‘that, other than by abstraction, none of you can really count above three.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘But just for an example, I’ve walked into the Dyethshome amphitheatre when it was three-quarters full and then again when it was four-fifths full and had no immediate sense of the difference.’ The amphitheatre at Dyethshome has ninety-nine tiers of seats rising about the central skene. I looked about the eleven tiers of stone that rose around Santine’s room, on the bottom of which I was sitting now. ‘Crowds
… large numbers …’ I shrugged. ‘They’re mostly things one finds today doing metaphorical work in bad poems.’

‘I suppose it’s because I’m one of those,’ she said with one tongue; and with another, ‘women that humans fascinate, in all the ambiguity the phrase allows in our language(s) – ’ She added the plural with still another tongue evelmi usually only used for tasting, then picked up the sentence with still another (whose relation to the first I could no longer figure I’d blinked) – ‘and it still, after all the intercourse between our cultural discourses, does,’ and, with another tongue, ‘doesn’t it’, and concluded with the traditional tongue for endings: ‘Yes?’ Then she laughed. ‘As a foreigner to this city, I know there is a grammatical mistake in there somewhere. Here, my young friend: taste.’ With the deep, disturbing rumble that was evelm laughter, she came to me.

I kneeled up to lick first one stone (peppery, with an aftertaste of mint), and another (the cool inertness of most rocks), and another (the ashy saltiness not of sodium chloride but of some potassium substitute). Santine gave me the fourth to hold and taste at my leisure, and I leaned back on the cushions, much more relaxed now that I had experienced some kind of familiar greeting. ‘Santine, you know what I heard not so long ago? In the play of the universal machinery, another world has met its destruction.’ So much for what one doesn’t want to talk about. ‘A whole human population – ’ somehow I just assumed it was an all-human population – ‘was annihilated.’

‘Yes, you humans do that to your worlds from time to time, don’t you?’ Santine mused. ‘Were there any survivors?’ She moved off again to her shelves.

‘There had to be some,’ I said. ‘One. Or a hundred. Or a thousand.’ I adjusted myself on the cushion. ‘Isn’t
that an awful thing to have to think about while you’re … gallivanting about the stars, as you put it?’

‘It’s not a terribly pleasant thing to think about while you’re bound to the surface of a single planet,’ she said. ‘Sometimes you do it to other people’s worlds too.’

‘Mmm …’

‘How happy I am that the processes of thought are so different between my race and yours. We love you.’

‘We love you, too,’ I acknowledged. Another ritual – indeed, I’d never questioned what it meant. But it always made me feel good. ‘How long has it been since I’ve seen you now?’

‘Not long. To me. Years. Standard.’ Santine, instead of sitting, was pawing about in another set of shelves. ‘And not many of those. And in that time, I have been looking over the book you lent me.’

I frowned. ‘Book …?’

‘I suppose I shall some day become accustomed to,’ she declared with one tongue; and with another, ‘the religions of you humans: they fascinate me. Only,’ and a third took up, as she turned from the shelf with a familiar object in her midclaws, ‘the book you lent me has little to do with religion. It seems, from all I can find out either from it or from General Info, to deal exclusively with art and life. Which, as I first said to you when you were a two-year-old, doing knee paintings on rough fabrics about your mothers’ claws: I do not understand your race’s concept of art. Nor am I that secure about my own race’s notions on that intriguing topic.’

‘Vondramach Okk,’ I said, because I recognized the leather, glass, and aluminium volume in Santine’s claws. ‘I remember loaning it to you. You said you were interested in Vondramach’s religious thought; so I lent you her poems. I just suspected you might find something in them to illuminate her theological notions. I’ve always
felt the poems provided an interesting commentary on her religious period.’

‘Nothing.’ Santine clicked her bluish claws on the bluer clay. Where she came from, that was an ironic sign for negation, though evelmi in the very far north make the same gesture for intense agreement – while those who grow up near Morgre don’t make it at all. ‘They suggest a virulent critique of everything religious, yes.’

I laughed. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘for humans, the declaration “God is dead” is just as religious a comment as “I believe in God”; and the infant, innocent of all theology, seems as holy as the studied saint. Do we humans have a broader notion of religiosity than you?’

‘Merely less refined.’ Santine arched her upper gum ridge, which was a smile. ‘Vondramach intrigues me because she had tasted the bitterest sins. Such flavours authorize the highest, the deepest, the widest religious feelings that pull us away from all social centres. But these poems, as you call them, are things made with the taloned claw rather than the perceiving tongue.’

‘I think,’ and laughed while I both thought and said it and so probably distorted both processes, ‘that because you evelmi have more tongues than fingers – or taloned claws – you will never understand us humans, really.’

‘And that is why you humans kill us in the north,’ Santine declared. ‘Ah, yours is a political statement if I ever heard one. Well, your Vondramach was a mistress of politics as well as art and religion, yes? But in those two fields, she leaves me far behind.’