Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (36 page)

His big foot came down with the heel a centimetre beyond the trough rim. He staggered around to face me, not looking surprised.

‘You’re supposed to step
over
. You yell at little kids for getting their feet wet in the door trough.’ I laughed. ‘Look …’ as I stepped over.

The blue liquid, behind us now, began to foam; the foam rose, climbing at the jambs faster than in the middle; and darkening, and shutting out light as the door’s semicrystals effloresced.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’

Rat turned, his eyes gone empty glass; we started up the corridor.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said – as Rat stepped wide of the irregularly shaped footpool with the bubbles shifting about on it – ‘you
are
supposed to step in that when you come in from outside.’

And did.

So he went back and did too.

Tingling heels drying, we walked down the resilient woven flooring of the shadowy tunnel. Here and there along the arched ceiling or the curved wall, a metre-wide vent, or sometimes a three-metre-wide vent, let in light.

The abstract statues along both sides, no matter how many times I come in here (three, five, ten times a week since I was twelve – at least when I’m home), always look like people for the first few seconds, till your eyes adjust to the dimness – at which point you begin to make out
the people, humans and evelmi, who stand or stroll among them: not many in this run, this time of day.

One I did recognize came over to me, didn’t bother to sniff my feet (in case they do is why you step in the foot trough) and nuzzled my groin; I scratched behind his wide purplish gill-ruff (the male and neuter evelmi’s most sensitive erogenous zone) and his great wings quivered a bit – and I walked on.

Korga looked at me with empty eyes.

I smiled. ‘You know, we’ve been going through this once a month at least since I’ve been coming here. I still don’t know his name, and we’ve only had real sex maybe six times in all those years. Still, he comes over and greets me every time I come in. Or if I’m here when he comes in, I always greet him. Are there any statues that particularly intrigue you? If they’re all too baffling, I’ll just point out my favourites.’ I touched his arm. ‘It goes without saying, if you see anyone who attracts you more than the statuary, just go on over.’

The hollow-eyed face looked down. ‘This is where you come for sex?’

‘And sculpture.’ I nodded for him to follow me between two high vegetal shapes of plastic with a ring of taste plates at licking level. ‘At least for the day-to-day variety when you want to spend less than twenty minutes at it on your way somewhere else. The sculpture, at any rate, is a bit restricted …’ I nodded at the construction on our right: a female evelmi with claws of an impossible verdigrised bronze but, other than that, an uncannily lifelike reproduction. At the uncannily high level of reproduction, the artist had worked in a number of subtle contradictions: her turmeric-coloured gill-ruff rustled as though she were perched on a mesa edge, moments before a hotwind. Her lowered head moved back and forth over a fraction of a degree as though she might bend to sniff the
feet of anyone who passed in her run. The scales on her mid-haunches flexed slightly recalling the movements an hour after birthing (which only occurs months
after
hotwind time) – internal machines provided her with a dozen shadows of life, all from completely incompatible situations (at hotwind season, females do not usually come into all-male/neuter runs), the more shadowy for their bizarre dislocations – shadows that, as I watched, I wondered if Rat could even sense, much less feel the piece’s dark and oppressive ironies. ‘Modern stuff. Very experimental,’ I said, and felt silly passing on these judgements that only brought home their arbitrariness. ‘Very unconventional.’ We wandered on until we came to the structure of black globes, pocked with crystal lenses, sending needle beams into the other black globes that, from floor to ceiling, hung motionless in their suspensor field. ‘On the surface of most worlds worth the name, there’re very few serious reminders that there are other worlds about. When I got back from a diplomatic mission
₁
three years ago, and dropped in here on my way home, I was surprised to see what I assumed was a schematic representation of one of the information nets in the Web. Each of the worlds was represented as the same size; the information itself is suggested by beams of light … it all seemed too pointed not to be intentional.’ I nodded sagely. ‘It’s a giant model of microscopic luminous algae that you can find in the cover puddles floating on the top of -wrs in the colder latitudes south and north. At least that’s what the artist told me when I looked her up in the GI catalogue and called her to send my compliments.’

Mouth slightly opened, Rat raised his hollow eyes. (The sculpted balls were black and opaque; light lanced between them.) His eyeballs were black and clear. On
them, seen from the side, light lay out its web in a small reflection.

‘Excuse me.’ The hand on my shoulder, from weight and heat and texture, was not his. I glanced back; so did Korga. The other hand was on Korga’s shoulder. The male (human) said, mostly to me. ‘Could I interrupt you two long enough to take your friend to my friend …’ He gestured with his tongue at a purple-black evelm, standing a few metres down the run, foreclaws off the ground; darting long and short tongues from his jaw, creating no sound in anticipatory lust.

‘I said: ‘You must ask my friend.’

Korga said to me: ‘Will you watch if I go? Please?’ And to the human: ‘Is it all right if Marq watches?’

The human, surprised, smiled and shrugged at once: ‘Yes. Certainly. Of course.’ And to Korga: ‘You have come from very far away, am I right?’

Korga glanced at me.

‘But that’s no matter.’ The human hand dropped from my shoulder but remained on Korga’s.

About ten metres up, there was a large ceiling vent that let in its dozen trapezoids of light. I stood at the shadow’s edge, joined – before the three of them, Korga, the human, and the evelm were through – by a dozen others, their cool scaled haunches and warm fleshed shoulders jostling mine.

‘On my world, there were pictures – ’ Korga said, then interrupted himself. ‘Did you come?’

‘Yes … But you didn’t.’

‘I was too excited.’

‘That can be a problem.’

‘Mostly by the human – but the other … you see on my world there were pictures,’ he repeated. ‘Of creatures, like that. Lizards. Dragons. Some had wings.’

‘The evelmi aren’t dragons,’ I said. ‘And confusing an evelm with a dragon is rather like confusing a human with a chimpanzee.’

‘Chippa …?’ asked Korga.

‘To be sure,’ I said. ‘There were probably no other primates besides humans on Rhyonon. Not that I’ve ever seen any in vivo myself. Still, dragons are what we’re hunting, Rat. Evelmi – like you and me – are women. You don’t know what goes on in the north of this world. A good deal of the trouble comes from certain humans getting rather confused about just such not-so-fine distinctions.’

‘But there were pictures,’ Korga said. ‘They were imaginary pictures. They weren’t real. I used to look at them – sometimes for hours. They were beautiful. Some of them had wings. Some didn’t.’

‘Females and neuters have wings. Males don’t – generally. Of course that’s true of evelmi, dragons, and half a dozen other trisaurian species on Velm.’

‘But I’d never seen one alive before. I never knew I could feel … lust with one!’

I laughed. ‘If I can, you can. And I have, many many times.’ We turned by a black, shaley structure, one of whose protuberances actually went up and out an overhead vent into Iirianilight. ‘That’s Japril’s decimal points at work again.’

As we approached the wall, it collapsed into the trough. Handfuls of foam dissolved into clear blue between the ornate, tarnished jambs.

4.

An upper park lay shadow over us and the dark sand we came out on. Pole-lights laced their long reflections on the plastic blister rising among banks of maroon shrubs. (I looked for the light in his eyes – but his eyes were again white and green.) Some women – most human, most pregnant – came down the further path, carrying their heavy breasts and high bellies above the dim dyll clusters hanging at the tops of the squat rock cactuses that grew thigh high here out of the direct sun.

‘The union we’re going to is just down there,’ I told Rat. ‘Before we go down, would you like to see – ’ and some diplomatic sense (the same that had finally taught me to deal with Thants) decided me that ritual direction rather than ritual request would be less confusing: ‘I’d like to take a look at my old nursery. Come with me.’

We walked across the clearing, between the shrubs, up to the carved wood rail around the plastic shell. ‘Look in.’ I leaned forward. ‘Go on. Look.’

Beside me, Korga leaned among the narrow leaves and gazed through the plastic wall.

Each big as a big woman’s two fists together – say Korga’s – their infant fur, which would darken in a decade and fall off except for the leg pelts, now dull pearl, their belly scales metallic copper (some few out of them had silver stomachs), infant evelmi lay on their backs, kicking their six legs leisurely, licking and licking and licking their lips.

‘There’s another nursery just below it, where human children are taken care of before they start their official study groups,’ I told Korga. ‘Human and evelmi have such different lifestyles and rearing styles. Evelmi aren’t
ready for gestural language until four and verbal language till six. But it’s still astonishing how much we’ve taken over from them. Not to mention what they’ve taken from us.’

‘Do they ever mix them together?’ Korga asked. ‘All of the children, from both races?’

I watched Rat gaze at the evelm infants. Clawless fingers; pale fur that would become dark scales in maturity; what northerners called the ‘milk tongues’ dominating their mouth movements – I guess because northern humans started it, the term is frequently considered offensive here in the south; but I always heard it in my stream, both from humans and evelmi, and I was ten before I learned to be circumspect about using it outside. ‘They all play together several hours a day.’ I glanced down at his big knuckles, his rings, his gnawed nails, remembering my time here. ‘More and more as we both get older.’

Without looking up, Korga said: ‘Those women back there are watching us.’

I didn’t look up either. ‘Are they?’ I tried to recall them, the humans in simulated purple scales; wondered if they would look away when I looked up. ‘Well, one of the more famous runs that females, neuters, and males use together lets out just down there. They’re probably wondering if you’re going to go in. Really, there must be quite a web of rumour forming about you. You’ve gotten quite popular in – well, it’s under a day.’

Korga’s hand closed on my shoulder. He moved closer to me. ‘Should we go on, Marq?’

We walked along beside the pentagonal bases of the pole-lights, circling the big dome in which evelm infants so slowly grew. At the path side, we passed a metre-wide grill through which came the muffled screams, shouts,
sobs, and laughter of the very loud human infants growing up below.

I glanced back at the women – who were, indeed, turning away; one gestured for another to look away.

‘There’s a drop-lift over there,’ I said. ‘The hunting union’s a few levels down.’ We walked through different vegetations, none local and each from a vastly different latitude, each requiring careful and individual tending here in this alien clime by the night-shift gardeners
₂
, absent this morning. And because their foliage was all pale blue, I wondered if Korga took in any distinctions through his false eyes.

5.

Only a few other women were on the lift down with us, two in rather worn work tunics, one in a clean pink one with a spiffy new union insignia I couldn’t quite make out because there was an anxious guy standing in front of her and swaying, naked – she must have been on a labour
₂
-sabbatical and leading the far more anxious life one does in such situations.

Through the gridded floor, I watched the cable loops drop faster than we did. At the next level, the irregular ropes and metal railing shifted, clanked, rose, and a very boisterous group of oldsters surged on, so that for half a minute we were caught up in the thunder of their converse, as this one jumped and waved her claws over the head of a friend to get the attention of a third, while that one, in her excitement, furled and unfurled great, redlined wings.

Silence throbbed, a level after their departure.

We walked out below the thirty-metre pillars. Korga looked across the maroon and blue tiles stretching
between them. In the distance a wall of mosaiced reliefs and light-shapes curved and recurved.

After a few more steps, Korga just stopped.

He looked some more.

‘This is the second industrial level,’ I told him. ‘But it gets more ornate, the further down you go.’ The evelm influence. Humans seldom combine labour with anything
this
decorative.

Most of the unions on this level are entered from the top. Here and there over the floor, carved gates stood around entrance portals; workers
₂
filed about. A few sleds, winged like dragons, with two or three women leaning at the rails, made their ways along farther transparent lanes. ‘We can walk,’ I told him, ‘or we can go up – ’ I pointed at a stairway to the overhead rollerways, fringed with ivory plants, indigenous to the hive caves one finds only in the north – ‘and ride.’

Somewhere, wind rose a moment, then quieted. ‘Let’s walk,’ Korga said, eyes still up and moving.

I began to walk.

His hand shifted on my shoulder; Korga walked with me.

As we came up over a blue, shaly outcrop, set each side with old statues that had belonged to some ancient labour co-op, here before the city was sunk, the sound of whirring treads cleared from the irregular underground winds.

‘Hey there, you – ’

I hadn’t heard the tracer tank nearing us; I was surprised. I guess all the other attentions Korga had received today made me start to move off.