Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (29 page)

And I thought: How could his fingers, even that big,
hold
so many rings? Three iron ones: four bigger ones of bronze; some were narrow and copper; three, of pale gold, on different fingers, were set with shards of different jades, two, on the same, of bright aluminium, with both agates and opals; the platinum one on his thumb was cast in a shape very like one of our local dragon’s heads, big as a dyll nut and gnawing a mistrock as big.

‘Zetzor is a very different world from Velm, Marq. And Nepiy is different from them both. But one thing that Zetzor and Velm share – at least your part of it and my part of it – is that they both function under the Sygn. We have never been seriously religious any more than you have. But to be asked suddenly to adopt a religion that, in a sense, we’ve never really known; to be asked, suddenly, to abandon one world for another, to leave our home – ’ A nervous motion took her a step to the side – in front of him. And I think I actually saw her for the first time, while he became only a brown canvas knee, creased and with a worn spot, the brown curve of a shoulder, reddened further from the ceiling panes, visible at her side, all equally and confusingly astonishing. She looked down at the loose flags, pushed at one with her baggy boot’s soft leather. ‘I love the Thants, Marq. And I’m terrified for us. I’m terrified that Thadeus will get her way. And I’m just as terrified that she won’t.’

‘Nea…?’ I said, and did not take a great step either to the left or to the right. ‘Look, maybe we should go
inside and talk to Egri about this.’ I think there was a slight ringing in my ears. Low in my abdomen it was as if a bubble had suddenly blown up to push all my organs around into uncomfortable positions. I mean, what do you do when you first see your perfect erotic object and have been assured, by unimpeachable sources, that the perfection is mutual? (The one thing I can vouch for; I never had the slightest question
who
he was.) ‘Come on, Nea,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

With neither nod nor smile, and my ears and knees heating with diplomatic embarrassment, I fled the chamber.

Nea came after me. (Did she look back at her companion and excuse herself? I didn’t hear. I didn’t see.) She caught up to me when we were halfway down to the skene. (And from the invisible chamber, he watched me with his invisible eyes.) As we stepped out on to the amphitheatre stage, me naked and her in leather and foil, I think I was about to turn around and rush back, when Nea said, in a funny kind of voice: ‘What a
strange
one, Marq … ! I could tell you felt it too!’

‘Nea,’ I asked, and felt like a fool for it, for somehow with all I knew, I didn’t know at all: ‘Who
is
…?’ I began but was afraid to place before her the pronoun that would place me with … him.

‘She
is
rather odd,’ Nea said, confirming what, I was unsure. ‘She’s just another one of your students – at least I assume so. We got to talking on the monoline down. In the whole trip, I didn’t manage to get her name. But I gather she’s from
very
far away.’ Then, as we stepped across the grill and started up the cracked steps, she gave a great sigh, and I could almost hear her thoughts travel thousands of light-years off. We reached the top of the stair, beneath hanging green. Mirrored blades swung in and out at us.

5.

And missed.

‘Max! Shoshana!’ I called from the ramphead. ‘Egri! Guess who’s with us this month.’ I came around the walkway, the bright fan-blades flashing behind grills in the high walls. I glanced to the side, waiting for her to catch up to me – so I could take her arm, I realized; which is what I would have done with any human or evelm from this particular locality. But polar Zetzor is not Velm’s M-81. I slew the impulse. ‘Nea has something she wants to talk to you about.’

As we came to the bottom of the ramp, Nea held out both hands, red foil, right; green, left. ‘Max, Shoshana …’

Shoshana stood up from the stool of the big console-size reader. ‘Nea? How have you been! What in the worlds are you here for? It’s wonderful to see you. But – ’

‘Are your parents here?’ Large Maxa rumbled affably from her perch. ‘It would be just like the lot of you to leap stars and not a word to anyone that you were arriving! You should have let us know – ’

‘It’s just me, Max.’ Nea laughed. ‘And I almost had to break laws to get here. I’m officially enrolled as a student. But the real reason I’ve come is for advice.’

‘You came all the way from Zetzor, by yourself – for advice?’ Shoshana’s smile was disbelieving. ‘Really, the way you people flit from world to world – like gnats from one side of the Hyte to the other.’ She put her hand on Nea’s epaulet. I saw Nea start to pull away, then remember she was not on Zetzor. (My social picture of the dark life in the canyon at 17? Endless horseplay of a distressing violence and stylization, laced with scabrously affectionate
invectives, in which no two people ever touch. I’m diplomat enough to know it’s a distortion, but it’s a distortion of something there.) ‘I’ve visited fifty worlds by vaurine projection – ’ which is how most of us satisfy our tourist urge – ‘and two in vivo, when Egri took us to Kensitty. But,’ Shoshana declared, ‘I will
never
understand unlimited space-fare!’

‘Neither do most of the shipping officials in the Zetzor north-quadrant spaceport. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’ Nea stepped away from Shoshana, and looked up at the perch. ‘Egri, I thought maybe you could help me. I mean you’ve travelled from world to world and know the problems that occur between them. Thadeus thinks there’s an opportunity to go to Nepiy as the Nepiy Focus Family. But it would mean …’

I went over and stood next to Shoshana, who leaned against the twelve-foot totem carving from some far north geosector (anchored three ways to the tolgoth planking by antique, black, flat-link chains), looked attentive, and did not listen as Nea retold with more detail and less clarity what she had outlined to me in the amphitheatre. The strange things about perfect erotic objects (when perfection is out to that many decimals): though you can remember dozens of details about them – a backlit ear clawed with rough hair, casting shadow on a pitted jaw; the wrinkle of a vein beneath thin skin lying over the ligaments fanning to pronounced toe knuckles; the wide lozenge of a thumbnail gnawed back from the callused crown, a knuckle below bright metal and brighter stone – still, you can never remember the woman; that is, you can never remember your sense of the woman as a self; at least not the way you can with any number of friends, acquaintances, or even some stranger, say, glimpsed frowning down at a gaming machine as you pass the door to a recreations lounge, maybe an outlet servicer logging
her cheeses on the transport skid halted on a ramp from the lower level, or even some Web official with a mound of authorization stamps on the desk before, and a bank of check-out lights glittering behind, now half a galaxy away. Someone once pointed out to me that there are two kinds of memory (I don’t mean short- and long-term, either): recognition memory and reconstruction memory. The second is what artists train; and most of us live off the first – though even if we’re not artists we have enough of the second to get us through the normal run of imaginings. Well, your perfect erotic object remains only in recognition memory); and his absolute absence from reconstruction memory becomes the yearning that is, finally, desire. That socially surrounded absence, when you’re young, masks a lot of things in the real world; when you’re older and a few thousand sexual encounters have begun to clear what desire is about (or perhaps what really lies about desire) and you have begun to perceive desire’s edges, its effect is not so much that of an obliterator any more as it is that of a distorting lens. If you can smile at what you see through, it’s sometimes illuminating. That was the distortion I was experiencing now, so that when Nea suddenly exclaimed:

‘… but things happen on Nepiy that can’t happen here! You can’t imagine how different that world is from Zetzor!’

– what I saw was not the cities blasted into the shadowy walls of the canyons that worm the polar plates of Zetzor (its equatorial regions clotted with lichen jungles, fused deserts, and fuming bismuth swamps that make the -wrs of Velm seem like ancient carburettor leakings); what I envisioned was a scape of silicate sand, airs darkened to dim gold by dusts too hot to bear; and through kilometre after kilometre of umbrial dunes, the only irregularity beyond the grit rush was one shadow,
barely human, stalking away. I imagined it; and thrilled to my imaginings – even as I realized that, like all our images of the alien, it comprised the simplest recombination of the familiar: the hotwinds that ravage for three months across Velm’s own southern temperate zones transposed to Velm’s own north-polar wastes.

‘Well, you were right to be upset!’ Shoshana announced at my side. ‘The Family/Sygn conflict is in the process of creating a schism throughout the entire galaxy, concerning just what exactly a woman
is
. And it may mean that instead of one universe with six thousand worlds in it, we will have a universe with one group of some thousands of worlds and another group of some thousands of others, and no connection between the two save memories of murder, starvation, and violence. And in a situation like that, no, you do not just simply decide to up and change sides! Even to become a … Focus unit!’

‘Not just a Focus unit,’ Large Maxa said gently. ‘A Focus
Family
.’

‘It’s the fame,’ Nea said, a green fist and a red fist tight against her hips. ‘Honestly, it is. A standard year ago, now, when we last visited a world called Ulus, we passed through a geosector called Ajegit and stopped at a city named Skesss. Among the white roads that wind the twelfth and thirteenth above-ground levels – Ajegit’s bedrock is too hard to have underground stages as you do here – there was a major traffic artery, with shops and public art works, called Dyeth’s Row, named after your seven-times great-grandmother. Thadeus made sure from GI; and we all went to see it.’

‘My dear,’ Large Maxa said, letting her green and glimmering head lean to the side, her gold eyelids sweeping across her onyx eyes and some of her tongues a-twitter beneath the bony arch of her upper jaw, ‘there are half a dozen streets called Dyeth’s Row scattered
about the various urban complexes all over Velm. No doubt there are another fifty scattered about the cities of other worlds. Mother Dyeth toured with Vondramach for a while, both on this world and others. There was much pomp, much ceremony. Streets, parks, and concourses were named after various heroes in the Vondramach entourage. But that means nothing now. None of us have ever walked down more than one or two of them. Nor is there any reason why we should want to. And besides, to share a name with fifty or a hundred-fifty streets out of the hundred billion streets among a hundred million cities, most on worlds not ours, is not fame. What could it mean, to us or anyone?’

‘It meant something to Thadeus. And Clearwater; and Eulalia too.’ Nea looked first at one of us, then at the other. Her skin was the ashy brown of a woman pigmented dark by heredity who has lived most of her life on a cold world at a pole turned eternally from its sun. ‘They very much
wanted
us to see it – that’s why they took us there in the first place. They were proud for you, and proud for us that we knew you … A Focus Family becomes a model unit for the women for an entire world. We would have streets and parks named for us … at least on Nepiy.’

‘It’s to be expected – ’ Maxa boomed in her languid bass, though she had begun to flex the muscles that moved the spurs on the back of her hind claws; I wondered if Nea knew her well enough to recognize it for a kind of nervousness. (Though on most evelmi from the Fayne it indicates intense joy.) A second tongue took up ‘– on a world that received a touring entourage of Vondramach’s a whole seven ripples ago. It means nothing today.’

‘Magma!’ Nea declared, turning again. ‘It meant something to
me
, Max! Egri, Marq, you’ve travelled between worlds more than I have, unlimited fare or not. You
mean to tell me that on this world or another you’ve never gone to visit a street just because it was named for the Dyeths?’

I haven’t and was going to say so.

But Egri said: ‘Yes, I have.’

‘And didn’t it mean something to you?’ Nea looked like she might cry.

Egri kneaded a bony elbow with her knobby fingers. When she spoke, it was even slower than Max. ‘The point is, I think, that what it meant to me was very different from what it meant to Thadeus. Or to you.’

Maxa gave that thunderous hiccup that passes for an evelm
humph
! ‘Just up and changing sides like this, it makes
me
think they’ve been part of the Family all along.’ She began to step around on the other little platforms that made up the rest of the perch, though her voice went on in its low, leisurely roar. ‘That kind of irresponsibility is a Family characteristic.’

‘Fiddle,’ Shoshana said. Her job
₂
for the last year or so has been in an electronic instrument house. Fiddling, she tells us, is a very old term, whose origins no one is sure of, which means making small adjustments that are nevertheless absolutely necessary – though it seems to be connected somehow with some very ancient music. ‘Nea, I understand how upset you must be. And I’m even moved that you came all this way to talk about it. Simply because it’s as serious as it is, we just can’t make assumptions like that, Max. Zetzor, Ulus, Nepiy, all of them
are
very far away. We don’t really know anything about them – and no,’ because Nea had raised one fist up to her shoulder, not in anger but in frustration. Still, Shoshana knew how easily Thants can take offence, even if it never lasts more than a month. ‘I’m not saying the tastes of any of your words suggest spoiled ingredients. I am simply saying that no meal yields up all its flavours at
the first bite. Without contradicting a thing you’ve told us, I’m sure there must be more to it than that. We haven’t talked to Thadeus. We haven’t talked to Eulalia.’

‘Do you think I’ve been able to talk to them either? Not to mention Clearwater. I mean really
talk
to them? I know what they want, what they’ve said, and …
some
of the things they’ve done to get it. It makes me very frightened. Shoshana, Max, I don’t know what to do!’ Her last sentence was softer and shriller than the ones before. It’s so easy to lose the nature of the distress when dealing with the crisis of people from another culture, much less another whole matrix of cultures – which is what a person from another world always is. ‘If Thadeus, Clearwater, and Eulalia do go off to Nepiy, what about the rest of us? Should we go with them, with some hope of sabotaging – ’