Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (34 page)

Three of the lizards on the red platforms near the bottom had the female gilded gill-ruff. The fourth, a wingless male, was climbing down from bone to wood, flickering pale tongues, stepping about on six single-spurred feet: a day for the feeding grounds – which are more picturesque than the spas anyway.

I turned to the metal plate bolted in the carpet’s corner that would become, at my will and silent incantation, the entrance column.

I walked to it.

I thought. Light rose. I fell into the foggy corridor.

I walked along tapestried halls, or ones with web-hangings that had once decorated distant evelm cave complexes.

There are stairways up to the amphitheatre.

I climbed one, came out a side kiosk looking over the stage, and strolled out on the boards.

In the grey light, a warm breeze anticipated hotwinds. Arms folded, I ambled before the stone steps at the stage-back up to the west-court arch. I looked over the empty seats fanning from me, to the freestanding walls of ornamental glass, their panes dull, now Iiriani was before them. The kiosk down to the student quarters was behind the bank of fountains at the stage’s north edge. As I
came around the stone rim, I almost tripped over a mat stretched out before the door.

‘Oh, excuse me – !’ She sprang up (the jyga-jewellery student), blinking and remembering to smile. ‘Oh, hey, Marq … !’ Around her neck she wore the streamers that over the past few years I had seen from time to time in the streets of Morgre and that – for the past few days – I now knew came from Beresh. ‘You’ve come to take Korga hunting!’ She sank back to her knees. ‘That’s going to be wonderful for him. I wish we could all go with you … to watch him at the dragons. But …’ She arched her gumridge.

I smiled back, confused: I hadn’t
meant
to keep it secret …

‘Oh, here! Let me move my bed so you can … we just thought it would be a good idea if someone slept out here in case anyone came in to see him who wasn’t …’ She shrugged scaly haunches. ‘Well, someone who wasn’t supposed to.’ With the edge of the mat in both front claws, she dragged it a few feet back from the door, dropped it.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Sure.’ Still smiling, still confused, I walked into the kiosk and down the spiral stair. The first chamber, with its stalactites and cool pools, was a replica of the antechamber of the cave of the P’ol’d of Q’ik’har, a great (evelm) Senator of the north, whose incredible complex, built eight hundred years ago, Shoshana says, has influenced architecture all over this world – human as much or more than evelm. As I came down beneath the dim dawn colours of the skylight, the inlaid steps widened; and I recalled, as I so frequently did in this hall, a conversation I once had with a famous v’ea’d (the ’d is the same root word as in P’ol’d and means something between professor emeritus, systems analyst, and black widow) from one of the seven hundred university-chains
that wind from federation to federation over the surface of this world and through which the classical evelm education is disseminated. The v’ea’d had told me, as we strolled the night-time crags of G’groth, below which smoked the Z’yz-wr: ‘That we evelmi can, with many of our tongues, reproduce sounds you humans will accept as language has probably generated as much evil as it has good between our species. The real affinity between us is that all our myriad cultures, and all yours, are founded on love of illusion. It is not that we both talk, but that we both talk endlessly of persons, places, things, and ideas that are not currently before us to taste. It is not that we both build home-caves, construct travel-guiders that stretch for thousands of kilometres over the land, lay out social grounds, or put together musical compositions and complex combinations of food and flavoured stone, but that we both build, construct, lay out, and put together these things according to plans, visions, imaginative schemes that, until we have realized them, have no real existence.’ She flicked her wings, whose lining was a dun and greenish bronze that had blacked in the big moon’s light. ‘In the north, Marq Dyeth, I have been in raiding parties that have slaughtered you humans, as humans have slaughtered my sisters, my university colleagues, my male groomers and females whom I have groomed. There is no peace between human and evelm. It is only an illusion I am in love with as much as you, and it is what allows us to walk and talk together here in the south on this chill evening.’ As I went down, seeking Korga, how many worlds, I wondered, how many ways of life had suddenly made the transition to illusion, to mere memory, to meaning without referent? I stepped from the bottom step and looked over the underground lakes (and though history had more or less absolved the P’ol’d, she had been none too fond of those university-chains by the end
of her reign) and started over the clay floor towards the dormitory.

All the sleeping shells, ranged in two levels, had facilities for domestic cassettes; anyone who brought hers with her and put it into the playback would erect a fuzzy black sphere around the blue plastic sleeping-pad holder, her own environment within. Usually one could count on eight or nine dark clouds.

There was only one, in the far corner, fuzzily private.

Usually less than half the students, up late talking together, ended up falling out together here in the dormitory, since there were enough individual living rooms further along the hall to accommodate many times the usual student load. This morning on practically every shell there was a student curled on green, yellow, or purple matting. They were
all
here … !

Korga lay on his side in a shell near the centre, one frayed knee up, one out, unringed hand off the edge.

All six shells directly around his were empty.

As I started in among them, one of the students – the one studying Bybe’t Kohimi – raised her dark head and, blinking, recognized me: ‘You’ve come to take her hunting?’ She spoke softly. ‘It was wonderful when she came back here last night. We started talking with her. And she talked so simply … about her world, and what happened to it. Imagine!’

And the evelm student on the shell beside her rumbled in her sleep. ‘Imagine … When she came back … imagine …’

I gave her a smile nowhere near as surprised as I felt. I moved towards him among the shells. Someone turned on her pad. Another woke. I heard someone swing her legs from the shell to sit.

They were waking each other.

I reached his bunk – ‘Rat’ – took hold of his thumb, and pulled. ‘Time to hunt dragons.’

He opened his green eyes slowly.

The lids slid up the balls; that motion finished, his head rotated towards me; that motion done, he sat up on the shell’s edge and dropped his feet over – you have to understand this was the first time I’d ever seen a human wake like this. I recalled Japril’s descriptions of his waking after his rescue and knew now what she’d meant.

‘Hello, Marq Dyeth.’

‘Um … Rat,’ I said again. ‘It’s time to go hunting.’

Another student was up and standing beside the dark cloud around the cassetted shell, pressing the call button and calling softly: ‘Mima! … Mima! …’

As he stood, a muscle tightened on Korga’s jaw, moving the dark skin with its small, beautiful wounds, the irregular motion completely at odds with his inhumanly smooth movements. At his waist, for about eight inches, his chain belt had left link marks, while the pants themselves were now inches below; the hair down on the great knob of his ankle lay flat to the bone on the outside and, I saw as the foot moved on the clay, spreading as he put his weight on it, still hazy at the other.

Another student in an upper shell looked down.

‘Mima, she’s gotten up …’

As I walked with him out among the shells, I wondered at my own fascination at those places where sleep had inscribed his body at head, hip, and foot. I wondered too what had happened here before sleep. He had come as a student, yet I had never imagined his sharing their late talk, their brief or lingering affections. With no desire to keep our relation from them, I was still distinctly uncomfortable with what they might or might not have known. As soon as we reached the tiled pool, I whispered: ‘Rat, what did you tell them last night?’

He looked down at me. ‘I answered their questions.’ And his hand came down on my shoulder.

Which made me feel better. ‘What did they ask?’

We started up the steps.

He said (and I realized as he said it that what I had heard yesterday as roughness in his voice today seemed more like a resilient, a softened nap): ‘They asked my name, where I came from, what happened there; they asked why I came here, where I had gone with you, what we had done; they asked what we would do today.’

‘Oh.’ We neared the top door. ‘And you told them …’ From time to time I’ve bedded the odd student come to study, but till now better judgement had always made me put it off to the last few days of the session
₂
when the class is winding up and plans are being made to go home – for everybody’s peace of mind.

At the top of the kiosk, the student who’d decided to lie guard at the entrance squatted on her sleeping mat, hugging her middle knees with her forelegs and watching. ‘Good hunting. Good singing.’

I nodded, smiled, and tried not to skirt too fast around the fountains.

On the stone steps up to the archway, Bucephalus and Black Lars (a step above) sat; and Alyxander (a step below) stood.

‘Good morning, Rat,’ Black Lars muttered in her sisterly basso that with age had begun to pick up the same burr I identified with Large Maxa. ‘Good morning, Marq.’

‘We were wondering if you two wanted to come and breakfast with us before you went off to hunt.’ Alyxander fingered one of the small grey jewels clipped to her genital hair, which – as a human woman – was all she wore mornings. Her head hair was feathery, short, and for some reason wet. The breeze shivered it a little. She
stood on the uneven stones, as the rose ruff on Black Lars’ black neck shook to the same breeze.

‘Of course, if you would prefer – ’ Black Lars switched tongues and voice timbre in the midst of the verb – ‘to remain and eat with the other students, we would understand.’

Always reticent with strangers, Bucephalus only moved her long tail twice to the left and twice to the right as it lay on the stones – which, she’d told me some time in the last five years, was a sign of friendliness the neuter evelmi in an isolated mountain tribe in the far south used with one another, a language and custom that had all but baffled some of this world’s leading ethnologists till very recently. I wondered if she thought this was communication.

‘Eh … well, thanks.’ I wasn’t sure if siblings
or
students were the breakfast companions Korga wanted.

Rat said: ‘I would like to come eat with you.’ He looked at me.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Sounds fine.’ I mean they were trying to be nice.

‘Did you sleep well? Black Lars asked Rat as we started up the steps: she rose on her three downward legs as we reached them. Alyxander, on her human two, fell in beside me.

‘We came in to say hello to the students last night,’ Black Lars explained, looking at me now, ‘just as Rat was coming back. She told us about what happened to her world, about coming here to see you, that you were going hunting – and the relationship between you …’

‘I
would
have told you.’ I said. ‘Only I didn’t get a – ’ But Lars had turned back to gaze at Rat anyway.

Last to get up, Bucephalus only bounded after us when we were practically at the door.

We walked under the stone arch, the hanging green. In
the shadowed mirrors I watched the five of us, Alyxander on two feet (the tallest), Bucephalus, on all tufted sixes (the shortest) – though she was also the longest – approach the doors.

Rat and I were dull in the plates, which, in this light, showed scars and old scratches. We moved forward, among my siblings’ indistinct gestures, dim attentions, and shadowy concerns.

2.

‘We don’t usually divert the water through the fountain and spillway system inside the house,’ Shoshana explained, ‘unless we’re having a formal party.’

Alyxander had retired, with Bucephalus, about ten minutes ago, after presenting her food-gift and a polite minute of conversation. (‘It’s a shame we don’t divert the water through the spillway system more often, but we only do that for a formal …’) I was wondering what Rat made of the repetitions in conversations, in tastes: V’vish and Kelso, four minutes apart, had both brought small baskets of calla berries, which spoke of far too hasty planning. But Kelso, if I said anything to her, would simply protest: ‘You wouldn’t want him to think we were
too
stuffy …?’

Rat sat cross-legged on the leather cushion, his frayed knee brushing my bare one, while the dry sculptures leaning from the empty pool wrote across my memory the sprays and splashings complex meditations could activate – if I could recall the numbers, damn it! One after another of my parents presented herself with offerings of poached beetle flesh, fried cactus chokes, cheese,
more
calla berries, nectars, pickled lichen, or simple sucking stones.

Still, caught in some seven- or seventeen-hour ritual occasion on another world, I’ve often thought our informal breakfasts (which never last more than forty minutes) must be
the
optimum towards which all civilization tends.

This one lasted twenty-five.

And seemed to go on six out of a seven-season year.

‘Would you come look at my mines?’ Small Maxa said with a slight incline of her head as she gingerly set down a tray of warm meat-patties.

‘Yes.’ Rat stood up on a motion, his feet deep in the cushion.

Maxa blinked and looked confused, because there was no ‘of course’, or smile, or phatic politeness.

She glanced about – suddenly she grinned, turned, and called, ‘Come on, then,’ and bounded off, with Rat striding after her over the sandy floor.

‘Black Lars,’ I said, in whose room we had been sitting for fifteen minutes now, with the sandstone walls to our left and the sky scribed with the towervines growing from the rocks to our right, ‘
what
in the world is going on? I mean, one brings people home to bed, and everyone is very nice. But why all this?’