Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (20 page)

‘Is it autobiographical?’ Alsrod asked.

I was surprised. ‘Many commentators have taken it to be – though she wrote a much earlier draft of it when she was still a child at the hospital station at Jryla. But really, Alsrod, perhaps the next time you come you’ll be wired for local GI compatibility and we can …’

Nea still stood with her hand poised above her sister’s shoulders. I saw Fibermich off and joking uproariously with a bunch of parents, for all the world as though she were barring them from our conversation. Then I turned and saw what, in the corner of my eye, had given that impression: her metallic figure chased at forearms, temples, and calves with high veins, George Thant stood up on the bench by the spillway, arms folded, legs apart, staring over the milling heads between at Nea, Santine, Alsrod, and me. George frowned intently. At any intergeosector party people always do strange things and other people try to remain oblivious. At a party for folk of different worlds, both the strangeness and the obliviousness can reach surreal proportions. People milled about George’s knees, occasionally tossed a quip up at her, occasionally didn’t, and drifted on.

‘
I
would like to be a ruler, a president, or a mangler!’ Alsrod announced beneath her sister’s smile.

‘And I would like to be a poet.’ I laughed. ‘But I’m too far along in my life to start another profession
₁
; and fortunately there are laws and institutions today to prevent rulers from becoming manglers, at least on Vondramach’s scale.’

‘Weren’t there laws and institutions two hundred years ago?’ Alsrod asked.

Santine chimed in with one of her tongues in one of her more cajoling voices: ‘When one actually starts the historical research, it sometimes seems as though there weren’t. Now I have never been to another world, except once in a vaurine tour. Most likely, I’ll never go in vivo. Would you tell me: how do
you
find the flavour of the experience hangs in your mouth, my young wanderer?’

‘Well, with all this talk of poetry, it’s a shame to bring up a cliché, but a vaurine tour
is
more educational – and fun. And I suppose …’ (While Alsrod searched for the proper metaphor, I beamed all astral thanks to my old labour
₂
-mate for letting me out of the frying pan.) ‘Well, a vaurine tour simply serves up richer, better prepared, and more carefully orchestrated flavours than live chance possibly could …’

Without looking, I fingered another button on the book’s bottom to turn it off, and let the chain slide down through my fingers.

Alsrod stepped out from under the foil epaulets Nea’s hands had become, to continue her conversation with Santine. (The book bumped against my calf.) Nea still stood, still smiled, and still kept up her hands, as though preserving a cave into which her sister might retreat should she accidentally and irreparably disgrace herself.

An image: Fibermich and George, now that Alsrod had turned from me, coming together to join Nea in a toe-to-toe line for a precise and ordered bow. (Behind Nea I could see a stone cyhnk that had been brought here from the Arvin to decorate the room how many decades ago now: Nea’s arms, in their fixed position, looked like two more of the religious symbol’s branches transferred from the living trunk.) But before I could find
out if my vision was simply fantasy or social prediction, laughter exploded across the room.

Thadeus Thant came towards us, followed by my sisters Bucephalus and Tinjo and my other sister, white-skinned and livid-eyed Maxa. A swarm of three-centimetre metallic discs careened in a suspensor field maybe a decimetre away from Thadeus’s body. Blue, gold, copper, silver, and black metal whizzed about; turned on low, the privacy cloud was a convocation of comets. Between, now and again, you could see within, up here an aged eyelid, down there a parchment kneecap, higher a collapsed pectoral with its folded dug. ‘What are you youngsters plotting over here? How are you planning to do in your parents this time?’

We all laughed now.

‘We’re plotting to steal time itself from you,’ declared Fibermich. ‘We’re going to spike it to the floor as it slips by. And just as you come over to see why it’s so still, we’ll pull it out from under you – ’

‘– and send you spinning off around the galaxy’s edge,’ my sister Alyxander took it up, ‘on your grandest adventure yet, Thad!’

‘We’re planning to pluck all the best stars out of the sky and stuff them in our pockets,’ I said, ‘so that when we meet you once again and thrust our hands deep inside to hide our embarrassment, our fingertips will smart on them, as if they were desert grains, caught down in the seams, and we’ll smile at you on your way to a glory that, for all our stellar thefts, we shall never be able to duplicate.’

‘Respect!’ Thadeus said loudly, in that great, brassy voice – though the corporeal Thadeus always seemed so little inside the colourful cloud. ‘Yes, that’s respect!’ I believe this eldest of the three Thant mothers was honestly happy young Dyeths had taken time to learn at least
some of the rituals from the polar geosector on a far, far world. ‘Now why don’t you – ’ Thadeus waved an arm towards us seated children, though I only glimpsed a wrinkled elbow, a vein curving a wrist. Bright metal swooped and careened – ‘
you
show the kind of respect these youngsters do,’ and comets flew on across the pulsing colours on the pastel floor to join more of our parents.

All of us looked at each other; and all of us smiled; because I really think we all – Thant children and Dyeth children – in one way or another loved the old creature whom, because of the privacy discs always in flight about her, we saw so little of.

As such encounters do, this one dissolved our conversational group, and the fragments moved to reconstellate. I heard Santine say, as she moved off with Thad: ‘But you were talking about Nepiy? Young Marq mentioned it to me not so long ago …’ Curiosity would have moved me off after them.

But there was a motion by my eyes – then shadow. I stopped, surprised.

Alsrod had stuck her hand before my face and shook it. I blinked – but it was just a way of getting my attention. ‘That,’ she said, dropping her hand once she was sure she’d got it, ‘is a cyhnk, isn’t it?’ She nodded towards the carved stone medusoid, which, moments ago, her sister had stood before. ‘What does it mean? I mean this particular one?’

‘Now you know a cyhnk is the sign of the Sygn,’ said Fibermich, stepping up to rejoin us in her lace of small chains, clearly deprecating her younger sister’s disingenuousness: but she flashed a huge and toothy smile in case I didn’t know she was part of it.

‘The Sygn is the veritable and virtual enemy of the
Family on all, or almost all, worlds among the six thousand,’ concluded Nea, strolling up on the other side. As she moved in her armour of foil, studs, and leathers, a sly look suffused her dark, full mouth, to let us know she knew we knew she knew.

‘No, I mean,’ Alsrod insisted, ‘this cyhnk here. I know they all mean something different.’

‘It’s an old piece,’ I explained, ‘dating from about two and half centuries ago. It comes from a local monastery, the Arvin, at the south of Morgre.’ I glanced over at the statue. On its black display pedestal it was grotesquely handsome: a four-foot stone trunk that branched into seven writhing arms, each ending in a gross red gem. ‘At the Arvin, they used to teach that the cyhnk symbolized the difference between its own, unified trunk and its many-branching head, a sign of the difference between the one and the many. Myself, I was always quite sure it was a stylized presentation of one of the tolgoth cactuses growing on the other side of the Hyte: but even our local retreat stressed that the image didn’t come from our world or any world near it – though that was rather hard to believe with a forest of the things only a kilometre and a half away … at least that’s what it seemed like when I was eight or nine or ten.’

‘When did you learn,’ Alsrod asked, ‘that the meaning of the cyhnk was not the same everywhere in the universe?’

‘Only about ten years ago, actually,’ I told her. ‘On a world whose name I don’t recall, I came across an older Sygn retreat. Right behind them some looming temporary factory had just gone up that for twenty months would be hot-stamping out large, ceramic, ugly things so that the murals I had come to see in my free three hours before my ship took off – they dated from the time the building had been an exploratory outpost five centuries before –
were gummed over with black, protective elastic to absorb the shock and keep them from cracking. Anyway, once I doffed my airmask inside the irregular and blobbed transparent walls, distorting the starscape and rockscape outside, somehow a priestess got to explaining that the shape of the cyhnk I was familiar with back here on Velm was only one of many a cyhnk could have. On some worlds, apparently, it’s a trunk with just two branches, both quite straight. On others – the one I was on for instance – it had five branches, each of which was a regular helix. And on some – though I forget the significance of the number – it is simply a cluster of a hundred and eleven twisting spokes; then, on others, it’s only a single bar with a jewel at each end; and on still others, it’s a jewelled sphere – while on still others, it’s a plain one. These wise women in their deep robes and the grilled mouth-speakers they wore to disguise the individuality of their voices told me that on many worlds the cyhnk signifies, as it does on Velm, a difference between one part of itself and another. But on other worlds – for instance, theirs – it signified the difference between one cyhnk and another, the difference between the myriad kinds of cyhnks that exist on myriad worlds, the difference between the myriad dogmas, each one different for each different part of each different world, that make up the institution so frequently known as the Sygn.’

They all laughed again, this time, oddly, all on one pitch. One after another and each at a different speed, they began to rock, at first Fibermich, at last even George – who had come up to join us somewhere in the midst of my recitation. And though I now requested explanation from the sociological GI program I always keep on tap with visitors from different cultures (as they no doubt keep one on me), I could not learn the significance of that alien motion.

From the metal cloud that was Thadeus, once more her brassy voice boomed: ‘Respect for the old and appreciation of the new, that’s what the name of Thant is all about! And that’s what I found on Nepiy, too – that’s what made it such a wonderful world! Oh, if you’d ever been there, you’d remember Nepiy: chalk-white deserts under an onyx black sky, stretching to the horizon in all directions, with orderly crevices dug into them, where women live in harmony and goodwill in the dwellings cut into the stone – oh, no! Not like the zigzag canyons of Zetzor, but rational, orderly, precise. The gestures of civil intercourse there have a clarity and lucidity to enchant whoever appreciates the fine heights that human civilization can reach. A fine world, a wonderful world – I had a wonderful time there! Someday you must visit it. Oh, yes! You must!’ Thadeus laughed again, hugely and generously, while Eulalia, through the array of my own parents and siblings, trailing her clouds of metals, gems, and lights, moved around and around her co-spouse, miming gestures that, in our own world’s theatrical tradition, at any rate, indicated here obeisance, now mockery, there despair; or joy. And I could not help thinking that, although Thadeus and I may have been on the same planet, because, no doubt, we had been on it months and geosectors apart, we had really been to different worlds.

The evening drifted on.

When, for the tenth time, my eyes had gone ceiling-wards – not to examine constellations but to imagine the real stars far above their argent representations – I finally decided I’d had it.

Standing by a decorative wall of falling water from the spillway upstairs, I waited out the end of a story from (of course) Clearwater Thant, and (it was a rather good one), laughing, excused myself. Dark hands came up, but not to halt me so much as to push me on my way. And
Clearwater’s own light laughter followed me as I threaded from the thrumming falls. But I’d taken as much as I could of strangely behaved, too easily impressed, boisterous, familiar friends.

I went to my room.

6.

Way down and away from anywhere else, it had once belonged to a Dyeth mother, Ari, two ripples before. I’d been ten and had just returned from that first extended visit offworld to the giant moon, Senthy: Egri had taken me there to stay with my grandmother Genya for nearly a standard year, and my memory still swarmed with images of those tall women, their fur parkas drawn tightly around their pitted faces as they poled their boats in towards the high steel docks. Into those reveries, made suddenly exotic by a simple trip of twenty-six light-years home, my mother Maxa inserted the hard fact: I was of an age to choose up a local habitation and a name. The last was easy. With a bunch of my parents, I went down to the record union in Morgre’s lowest level, the knots in the polished pith walls recalling faces on another world, and registered the ‘Marq’ which people had been calling me all my life. The habitation, however, took some trips over and around the area to search out a proper spot – I wanted something rural, with natural rock, water, and all the technological comforts a rather spoiled twelve-year-old could imagine. My temp-parent, Kelso, was with us; and after several hundred k’s cruising about, she suddenly declared: ‘Look.
I
know what Marq wants! Do you remember Ari’s old place? Whatever happened to …’ Back home, there was the scrabble through the closet full of discarded domestic cassettes …

Today, honestly, I don’t know if I love the location more or the fact that it’s been a living room for Dyeths as long as it has:

Twenty-foot fire cactuses rose behind the ornate rail at the polished planks’ oest end. (Shells and rocks, rocks and shells.) Overhead, a few night clouds pulled away from the brilliant oversized star that is our larger moon. The rocks beyond the rail were tufted with giltgorse. An orange carpet on the dark wood gave under my bare feet as I walked from the fading entrance column. Beyond the platform, through the tolgoth growth, the stream plashed. How many times a week do I open the railing gate, take some text-crystal from the fiche-board standing below my bed (six carved legs, with strange ball-claws for feet, rumpled sleeping mat over it), along with a portable reader (what we have instead of clumsy, beautiful books), to go and sit, to sit and dream, my back against some velvet-barked elephant lichen, to dream and read, with warm water washing my ankles?