Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (21 page)

Between the hills that gentled the horizons to the north, the crazy jewellery of Morgre-complex’s upper park levels – my night light all through those strange years when childhood gives way to the beginning of adulthood – glittered like a little cyhnk; I was as far away from the city now as Santine’s room, but in another direction.

In the platform’s centre stood a round desk – old, locally crafted, a horror to look at, but ridiculously efficient. Its reddish top was cluttered with gaming pieces, editing blocks, lengths of tape, and the reassembled skeleton of a small creature resembling a desert skate but indigenous to one or the other of Velm’s polar wastes. Suspended above it all glowed a globe that, besides serving as a lamp, was also the central star in a double-sunned orrery – no, not Iiriani/Iiriani-prime – of ten
planets (thirty moons among them, one of which was, yes, giant and nostalgic Senthy, circling its huge, useless world, NRJ-6B), all rotating and revolving on their hugely slant and varied orbitals.

On the desk, the comscreen was still up out of its slot, a pile of dice in front of it; a piece of string on which I’d been practising whed-knots (an art performed by a small northern tribe of Velm natives with their hind feet; and I was improving) lay across it. Scattered before it were some text crystals from my seven-times great-grandmother’s unreadable memoirs which, that morning, I’d once again taken from the Old Library.

As I approached the desk, the bench rolled out from under it; the bench-back swung up and took the proper curve and angle. On the comscreen, which for some reason hadn’t turned off when I’d left, the pale colours of the ball court still pulsed: within the pentagonal frame, among the laughter, I watched Thadeus Thant (voice like a cracked klaxon, a gentle, jovial, jealous creature, who, now at age eighty, has learned to turn jealousy into ambition), Clearwater Thant (the quietest, smallest, and blackest of the Thants – the most prolific, in years the oldest, but looks not a day over fifty, my favourite, and by me the one with the dryest sense of humour) and imperious Eulalia Thant (an impressive redhead surrounded by more jewellery than I think all of us Dyeths owned, kilos of it floating out on suspensors that kept it turning slowly about her, as she turned about her children, her spouses, a woman with an insight into human motivations both cultivated and uncanny), and Fibermich, Nea, George, Alsrod … all bobbing about among human and inhuman Dyeths and friends of Dyeth.

I sat.

I watched.

I pondered the performance below long enough to
sense what an odd feeling familiarity is, consisting as much of the dark things that attract as it does of the bright ones that repel. Was it simply all that warmth and those good wishes? Sitting there, I felt it swinging at my side, and ran my hand down the chain to retrieve it: the pink light still glowed above the leather bound screen. Runes swarmed as I lifted it, giant gnats swinging about it as the book swung. (But I
thought
I’d turned it off …) Apparently in my haste I’d just flipped the random selector to still another poem. It had been on all this time.

On my cluttered desk top I set the book that could have been stage or sculptor’s pedestal. Above it hung dark runes that could have been a statue or a performance. Between them I watched the comscreen, bright with the party.

Before I tell you which poem was on, I want to tell you something that the title (in lower case runes at the very bottom) brought immediately to my mind. An evelm philosopher once wrote: ‘Almost all human attempts to deal with the concept of death fall into two categories. The first can be described by the injunction: “Live life moment by moment as intensely as possible, even to the moment of one’s dying.” The second can be expressed by the exhortation: “Concentrate only on what is truly eternal – time, space, or whatever hypermedium they are inscribed in – and ignore all the illusory trivialities presented by the accident of the senses, unto birth and death itself.” For women who adhere to either position,’ this wise creature noted, ‘the other is considered the pit of error, the road to injustice, and the locus of sin.’ At this point, I must explain that by ‘human attempts to deal with the concept of death’, the evelm philosopher in question meant only those humans who happened to have lived in this world, Velm, up in the beleaguered north or
here in the calmer south, for the last three hundred and eighty years. This philosopher was no doubt unconcerned with that greater death, Cultural Fugue, and if someone ever told her that the first attitude more or less categorizes the Sygn and that the second is indicative of Family, I suspect that this venerable sage would have returned a look to remind any human that the evelmi are, indeed, alien. (Of course: the perfect translation for the title of Vondramach Okk’s early participatory poem, even though the connotations differ: ‘The Alien’. Why hadn’t I been able to think of it with Alsrod?) The title of the poem I
had
accidentally opened to translated clearly and simply: ‘Stranger’.

I didn’t read it.

Fingering my scrotum, I felt my penis move on the back of my hand, till some unspecified desire began to weight and lift my genitals with blood. I waited for that desire to fix on some current masturbatory image. When it didn’t, I briefly thought I might leave my room, my home, and seek one of the city’s runs. But apparently whatever I was feeling could not express itself through public copulation any more than through private satisfaction. Desire died. What replaced it was a GI access code.

Had I really been thinking about it during the intervening time? I turned off the book and pushed it aside. I’d carried Clym’s warning about with me, anent security reclassifications contingent on inquiries after Rhyonon. But there was another operative in the tale that could be inquired after.

Why did I think about it now?

Perhaps it was simply because I was feeling I shouldn’t be feeling so at home.

I thought:
Non-human life forms
, and my mind filled with another lengthy access code of numbers and colours.
I read them over to myself. They cleared away, and I thought –

7.

– Xlv.

From the bottom of some distant GI storage bank – rank upon rank of the tiniest, brightest metalloids submerged in some super-chilled, coal-black, linearly conductive syrup – the information welled into my mind like memory: Among the many forms of life discovered in human world-hopping, a surprising number of them clearly intelligent, many of them culturally advanced, and even a handful with extraordinarily ingenious methods for getting between the planets and moons of their own sun systems, the Xlv are the single species besides humans who have an efficient means of interstellar travel. For many years their starships were mistaken for natural objects: massive, black, irregular as meteoric rubble, here and there a huge multifaceted crystal face glittering – through which nothing is visible.

Inhabitants of at least two hundred gas giants throughout the galaxy, the Xlv still can not be designated a race with whom we have ‘established communications.’ Our ignorance of them is oppressive. Do they have [a] language[s]? Can the term intelligence be applied to them? Do they know of our existence? There is still a raging debate on whether they construct their ships as humans do, or whether they secrete them in some way similar to the way certain insects secrete the waxy material for their nests …

As I reviewed their tripartite plasmoid biology, learned of their odd colonies that may or may not be floating well down in the atmosphere of gaseous planets almost large
enough to ignite into small stars, reviewed the rare space encounters between human and Xlv – so baffling as to leave moot in almost every case whether an encounter had or had not occurred – I recalled Okk’s absent half-lines in
The Alien/The Awkward/The Exotic
.

For most women, the Xlv are a complete question mark, nor are we even sure which direction that question mark faces. (They are a shiftrune whose sound sequence remains unuttered.) When our instruments detect Xlv on one world, how are we to know their social or political relations to the Xlv on another (Do they have societies? Cultures? Politics?); not to mention the relation of Xlv on one ship to the Xlv on another. (In the conflict between Sygn and Family, if one does something appalling to a neutral party – as has more than once been the case – the other certainly doesn’t want to take the blame.) What kind[s] of government[s] do they have? Which kinds get along? Which kinds are constantly falling into tension situations? Is interstellar travel for them analogous to the human discovery of the potter’s wheel, paternity, the solar system, or the semiconductor?

Among six-thousand-two-hundred-plus worlds and thousands of billions of humans and aliens, there are probably hundreds of thousands, even millions, at any moment, exploring aspects of the Xlv, scattered across any hundred or five hundred worlds. That is still a microscopic percentage of humanity as a whole.

If only because there is so much to know in our human universe, the working assumption you can go on is: You may assume, about absolutely any fact (how many transuranic elements are there? why does cold water remove human blood stains faster than hot?) that nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand do
not
know it – which goes for the working assumption too. And the Xlv, who, after all,
are
alien, touch an even
more microscopic percentage of human lives than most things. Thus: ‘There is an alien life form that travels between stars’ is simply another little-known fact – because in our human universe, of necessity,
all
facts are as little known as the works of great poets.

The green light bar before the comscreen on my desk was blinking under the tape rumple and through the dice. Some sister or parent or cousin was calling to find out where I’d gotten off to, jovially to demand I return to the ball court and watch the presentation of some elaborate gift, hear the recitation of some florid toast. Beyond the rail, fire cactus tittered. The warm breeze tickled my neck. Among cold stars a single light moved in a trajectory between moons – a satellite catching and throwing back a fragment of my world’s communicative complexities.

What would the Xlv mean to the Thants of Zetzor, the Dyeths of Velm, to the women, human or other, of (approx.) six thousand two hundred worlds?

What about the fact: There is an alien life form that may have destroyed someone’s world …?

What did that mean to the Xlv?

The call bar blinked green again. I started to press it, but for a moment I looked over the railing about the patch of mine that filled my after-dark horizons; and felt strange – estranged, really, as though considering the demise of one world made me a stranger to this most familiar spot on my own.

Might the ravines and marshes, the urban complexes and universities and hive-caves of Velm, I wondered, flare suddenly and broil away before a world-wide fire wall …?

With that smile we prepare so easily for friends, for stream, for anyone we love (and which always feels so odd in the ligaments of the human face; though the
evelmi among the Dyeths say they do not know this feeling), I pressed the answer plate. ‘Hey, Clearwater …’ I said to the familiar face forming. ‘Look, would you tell V’vish and Shoshana I’ll be back up in a while? Don’t worry, I haven’t finked out on you yet.’

At the same time the column of light that was the entrance to my room came on in the platform corner. I glanced at it as George Thant materialized, with that artificially metallized skin, looking very like a polished bronze statue, every one of her movements suggesting pyrite heated to that near-white temperature where the form begins to crumple like hot wax; and Zetzor is so cold.

She was laughing and rocking. But since she was outside (more properly, inside) the door (more properly, the column) and my viewing light had, finally, been fixed, I could see her; but she couldn’t see me. On the comscreen Clearwater was saying: ‘… and come downstairs, Marq, before George gets there and makes a nuisance of herself.’

George is probably the strongest person I’ve known from any world, physically speaking, who does not use artificial muscular additors. ‘Marq! Hey, Marq!’ She was flexing her brazen hands as though one or the other of them might be clutching a rock, a neck, an ice shard. ‘Come on and join the party. We want to see you!’

‘All
right
, George,’ I said. ‘I’ll be down in a few minutes!’

‘Look, only one of your beautiful sisters is still around. Egri is doing her lizard routine.
You’re
supposed to be the guy who knows how to make strangers here feel at home. Come on down and be hospitable!’

‘George,’ I said, this time loud enough for her to hear, ‘you would be at home in the pit of a volcano or on top of a glacier’ – both of which are structures common on
Zetzor and unknown on Velm. ‘Look, hang on to your left tit and I’ll be up when I damned well feel like it, you metallurgist’s reject!’ It fascinates me what makes some people comfortable.

George roared with laughter and turned in the column unsteadily, like someone a great deal drunker than I suspect she was.

‘Now stop cluttering my doorsill, gnat-brain, and leave me alone!’ And we do have gnats here. And I don’t like them. There’s an energy about the Thants, every one of them, that fascinates us Dyeths – almost every one of us. We regard it, watch it, discuss it endlessly. I wonder if it’s analogous to their fascination before our age and tradition. George is also the least sexually exciting human I can think of, which has always struck me as odd since strength and size are usually positive factors in my erotic schema. But in her great body, they just sat together wrong. I suspect the Thants surround for me all that is, or could possibly be, alien. (‘The alien is always constructed of the familiar,’ is as good a translation as any of ‘The Alien’ ’s opening half-line, though it lacks all music.) And I know that’s because any request for a false parity, where Dyeths might play a congruent part in the Thants’ schema, is simply not to be met with. Still, the fascination – much more than the simple desire to
use
– exists on both sides; probably exists less on their side than on ours, which is the wonder.