Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (38 page)

Any other day, I would have stayed around to ask about what the morning’s kollec on the union perches had been, probably gotten into a conversation or two with some other prospective hunters, swapped two or three hunting tales and songs. But as we walked with our bows back among the racks of equipment, with this clerk staring and two clients ceasing their conversation as we came by, I just wanted to leave – and found myself angry and confused at Rat’s even gait, which took the hunter-union’s sandy ground no faster than the run’s yielding floor.

I tried not to seem as if I were hurrying, and looked, I’m sure, like someone both hurried and confused. The clerk came with us to the scooter rack, stepped smartly around the back foils. ‘This one –?’

‘Here, Rat. You sit there – you can hold on either to this strap, or put your hands on my waist if that’s more comfortable.’

The clerk lifted the large bow from him and joggled it down into the scooter’s side braces, guiding its sails into the sail slots and pushing in the positioning ratchets.

My own bow went into the brace on the other side. I got my leg over, slid my bare butt back on the spongy seat, got my feet into the foot guides – which felt wrong. ‘Excuse me,’ I told the clerk, ‘do you have any human
foot stirrups, to fit this one? These are still set up for evelmi.’

The clerk dashed off, dashed back; the stirrups were changed in about forty seconds. Someone came to look; two others, already looking, walked away. I reached forward and pulled up the polarized sandshield.

Through the curving plastic, I looked out on – not sands, lichen, and the far horizon. (They, we know, are illusion. And the polarization cut them out.) The scooter was standing on a metal ramp, with more ramps either side of it. Ahead was an ornate arch in a stained enamelled wall, its ornaments gritty with the dirt that collects on the real anywhere illusion reigns.

I glanced back at the clerk, who was stooping on the sand to strap our daykit to the back bar, the Velmian sky brilliant above her, behind her the orange planes and reddish mountains.

‘All ready.’ She stood, stepped back.

‘Just relax, Rat,’ I said. ‘Hold on, and when we turn, lean with it and don’t worry.’ I looked forward at the shield – desert outside it, the enamel and metal of an urban traffic-way through it. With my heel I ignited the ignition.

We leaned forward, slid down the ramp – the union disappeared (Korga’s hands were momentarily iron on my flanks); and the view without and within the shield matched.

We rumbled into the tunnel.

Left of us, behind the mesh fence, the transport roller-way carried stacks of cargo at twice our speed. Right of us, a few more scooters scooted through; and once a covered kar overtook us and moved up ahead to disappear in the tunnel lights’ changing patterns.

I felt Korga move closer in behind me. Later I reflected on how well he took the curves – not like someone whose
first scooter ride this was; and I’ve ridden with my share of those, evelmi and human. The tunnel curved and straightened around us. We curved. We straightened.

Through the air rush, I heard him speaking down at my ear: ‘Those radar-bows are confusing objects. They are strange weapons.’ And as we neared the tunnel’s end and the true light of the desert opened over us, I realized suddenly Korga had no idea what, in a dragon hunt, we hunted.

More mica than sand.

With such an erosive climate, how does this land sustain so many edges? I’d asked the question as a child. General Information had let me over-lick several explanations, all of which centred about the geological forces underlying the markings and measurings of three-thousand-kilometre rock-plates floating and crashing (oh so slowly, over millions of years standard) above magma, as they tend to do on woman-sized worlds. To skim the mica sandshifts – these ten centimetre ledges that worm the upper plateaus, over which silver falls in veils – was for me to traverse all the informative forces below that underwrite this landscape.

Down a cliff ragged with purple fungi, the Old Hunter moved by boulders, her daykit lashed between her wings with rags. Rags are human-made; our daykit was tied to the scooter’s guide bar with the traditional yellow cord of fine braided cactus fibre. Cultural contamination? Cultural exchange? I’ve thought both over the years; I will think both again.

I halted the humming scooter, leaned it over, and got the triple stand stamped properly into the sand.

The sails on our bows wavered either side. The bowstrings buzzed notes too low for even dragons to hear. I kicked my foot out and swung my leg over the seat. The sand was still cool from the morning chill; kilometres away, a few twenty- and thirty-metre needle-rocks spoke of velmological happenstance.

Korga, all shoulders, knees, knuckles, and heels, dismounted, carefully awkward.

I grinned at him.

He gripped the handrail. Iiriani smouldered and exploded in his rings as he held it, dulled in his palm’s callus as he released it.

‘There’s been good cliff-purchase as well as sage-signs for a couple of kilometres now,’ I told him. ‘We should find sizeable dragons feeding.’ Microscopic and blue, sage is what dragons eat, and the cliffs, in the distance, rising broken, black, and yellow, are where they go to eat it. Korga stood beside the scooter, his broad hand on the bow sail, once more looking like a human hunter born in the brace and handles. ‘This is good hunting territory, Marq?’

‘For what we want, we could probably hike a little further to the –’

Crunching over the heavy lichen at the road rim, the Old Hunter raised her dusty snout. She blinked her black eyes slowly, only tongue tips tasting in the dry air the dust that dulled her upper lipbone.

Korga turned to look, leaving his hand where it was. And what had been a brave stance, by the simple movement, again was comical. I saw the Old Hunter lick that awkwardness with her eyes and not change her expression.

That’s why I loved her.

She extended one tongue: ‘You women are going hunting.’

I nodded; and still wished she’d look away – or Korga would. ‘I guess so,’ and laughed, finally able not to care, with another memory of my own first hunt. ‘How’s the catch been?’

Her head wagged a little. ‘Nothing so far. But there’re dragons to sing of over oestwards.’ Her wings, without
unfolding, hunched up on her back. She came up another few steps, claws too dusty to tell her origin, their points blunted by the sand she lived on.

She lifted her foreclaws a bit and raised her head, looking over our equipment. ‘Hello, young hunter.’ That was to Rat. ‘Where do you come from?’

Rat moved his hand a little down the sail. ‘Another world.’

‘Yes,’ the Old Hunter said. ‘I’ve heard of such among you humans. Is your world in the north?’

The young hunter in me jumped to explain. But the older one put her hand on my shoulder (where Korga’s hand had so recently calmed me), and I watched.

‘My world …’ He paused, turned, and looked at our sun – his eyes momentarily blinded me. The afterimage, as I turned now, starred the landscape black. Rat pointed about thirty degrees above the horizon – ‘is there, about seventeen-point-three-four-two thousand light-years away.’ Sun in a red stone on his forefinger vied with the mirrored balls under his lids. I wondered if galactic orientation were also within those rings.

‘That’s where the tiny yellow dragon flies.’ Her lip ridge arched and other tongues came out to try the tastes we laid on the air. ‘The yellow dragon.’ Two indicator tongues came close together, miming ‘tiny’, which Rat, I knew, would miss. ‘Your world. Yes. I taste your meaning, young hunter.’

The tiny yellow dragon is an imaginary beast and part of a minor but famous and rather complicated local myth cycle; I watched Korga hear it and not understand.

‘Your sweat leaves a strangely metallic taste on the air, young hunter,’ which, for the first few days after I came home from a mission
₁
in some artificial offworld environment, strange evelmi are always saying about me
too, though my friends ignore it. I pondered how short a time he’d been here.

‘Well, while you are hunting dragons, I shall be hunting you. And maybe when we have finished our day, we can sing of our catch to one another.’ Her paws came down on the warm soil. ‘Remember, young hunter, as you aim through the sights and sails of your bow, I’ll have you centred through my sights and sails.’

I pulled down the release strap of my bow brace; the bow slid towards me and I caught it by the haft.

‘You are Marq Dyeth.’

I grinned, as pleased that she had recognized me this time as I had been the first time it had happened on my third hunt when I was a child. To evelmi most humans look pretty much alike. Those living with numbers of humans develop their strategies for telling us apart; and those who live for years in the same house with us have no more difficulty distinguishing us than we – who live with them – have distinguishing them. But the Old Hunter herself had once told me, years ago, that the only way she could tell one human from another was by how she held her bow. ‘Good luck to the two of you.’ Her spurs flexed above the sand.

She turned away down the ridge.

Korga was looking for the release strap. ‘Marq, what did she mean, she would be hunting us?’

I pulled the last sail out of the brace’s sail slot. ‘She’s going back to her blind, where her bow and gear are stored. And she’s just letting us know that she’s going to be after us in exactly the same way we’re going to be after the dragons.’

Korga stood. ‘Then she is our enemy.’ It wasn’t fear; but you could read fear into it. ‘We must avoid her, Marq. Perhaps this is not a good day for us to hunt –’

‘She’s our best friend in this world,’ I told him. ‘The
Old Hunter, and hunters like her, are the reason that in
some
of the southern geosectors, evelmi and humans can live as one society. That’s not the strap you want, Rat. Pull the one below it.’

Rat pulled.

The bow brace swung out.

The sails quivered, leaned –

‘Catch hold of the haft!’

He did. And stood, the black-scored, light-absorbent sail rising by one shoulder, the white reflectant one by the other.

‘Remember how you were holding the bow back at the union? See if you can get it like that again – no, your left hand a little further forward. There. That’s more like it.’

2.

The Vyalou compresses immense variety into a landscape that always looks, from any one position, comparatively uniform.

We stepped over silver-shot sift-ribbons. On foot, we wound the narrow paths between igneous boulders which had cracked in two, the coal-black faces veined with yellow schist. We crossed a natural bridge over a dry gully that had once been an underground river, left there by early human colonists, whose roof had caved in. We paused at a place where white blossoms the size of pinheads, which you had to look at from less than a dozen centimetres to make out their individual petals, lay across the sand, aping the north-polar frosts. We set our bows down on their three-jointed feet; I made Korga put his ear to the sand to hear the subvelmian thrum of waters crashing some seven metres down – in a newer colonial waterway, which an Old Hunter had assured me,
in my fifteenth year, would too lose its roof and dry, oh … within three-quarters of a century.

‘There, look –!’

Korga’s head came up, sand and mica on his ear’s curve.

‘– can you see her flying, towards the crag?’

He squinted silver into the sun. ‘Yes …’

The dragon disappeared behind the stone.

‘… I saw her flying.’ He brushed sand and mica from his cheek.

I got up and hoisted my bow. ‘Let’s go on.’

Korga hoisted his.

We trudged.

We crawled under a fallen sheet of elephant lichen (ancient gift of the Web); its dried crust lay over a gully so close to the ground I wondered if we could get our bows through.

We did.

We climbed a red-rock slope with its black and orange pittings.

The dawn wind was steady south. Once I looked back to see, behind Rat, the Vyalou undulating away. The nearer sand-sifts were dark lines, now and then pricked with light.

‘Around here and down …’

Rat caught up to me. I moved nearer to the ridge, parked my bow beside me on the rock, and leaned over. I heard Rat getting free of his own. Then his shoulder brushed mine; his rough hand came down half on stone and half on the back of mine.

Directly ahead, three beasts lazed and gentled on the air.

A wingless male was crawling down the rocks, going away.

Much higher up, another dragon, like a bit of sloughed
tolgoth bark caught in a wind-swing, dived back and forth before Iiriani. As a child, when I’d first seen such configurations I’d always assumed the high beast was keeping guard for the others. Usually there’d be two or three males around – then I saw there
was
a second male, clawing around an outcrop of reddish stone to the right, talons making pink puffs as she scrabbled.

Two of the winged beasts planed towards one another and away.

The females’ wings were wide as mechanical worm-strainers, half again the spread of their intelligent evolutionary cousins’ and well over twice the area. Ethologists have described them, as I now whispered to Rat, as small herds of land-bound males, from two to ten, who roamed the rockier areas; and small flocks of females, from three to fifteen, who hover for a day or ten around them, before taking off to find another herd – while a lone neuter, almost half again the size of the females, flies high overhead, her singular flight patterns initiating intercourse between all three as she carries her load of nongenetic reproductive information. About seventy-five per cent of the offspring are borne by the females, about twenty by the neuters, and five by the males. The male dragon birthing is violent, almost always injurious, and frequently fatal – it seems to be, evolutionarily speaking, on the way out. In the evelmi, only females and neuters carry – males sometimes have practically unnoticed abortions, though male births occasionally occur in folk tales and legends: it’s probably projection, not racial memory, though there are adherents to that theory, too, in the north. ‘The fertilized zygote,’ I went on, ‘can end up lodging in either of the three sexes, though only the females and neuters seem biologically equipped with an efficient way to get the infant out of the body. Mostly what the muscles that control their ‘wings’ really do is
help in labour. People are still speculating on what environmental conditions nudged evolution in this direction sixty million years back when the pattern got established.’