Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (42 page)

I wasn’t in mind to argue. ‘We’ll go with you.’

The women scattered near, all faces now, were – most of them – backing away. But between, I could see women running up.

I pushed Rat’s elbow with one hand and slapped at the back of Ollivet’t’s mid-haunch with the other (comes from a local kids’ game in which, by such slaps, you urge each other to run); JoBonnot shoved at Shalleme’s arm with a gesture enough like mine to make the ID in me speculate briefly on the convergence of childhood games grown up worlds apart.

We hurried away from the scooters, the red glare, the convergent arrows.

‘Our scooters,’ Shalleme said. ‘Are you sure they’ll – ’ It takes a good three minutes for the identidisc to activate a local retrieval system, and I think she imagined the scooters immobilized by the crowd before they could begin their journey. Me too.

Some from behind were coming forward.

The red location light and bright guide arrows had stayed where they originally had come on – probably because this particular rotunda seldom received deliveries of moving cargo; tracking lights hadn’t been installed here.

A few women looked at us as we hurried by. (JoBonnot: No,
don’t
run!’) But most stared off at the red glow up from the floor between the three parked scooters.

We edged between some women who weren’t watching us and some who were. Ten metres away, the wall of one of the block houses split on blue light. The slate door slid back. Blue flooded the floor. JoBonnot dashed through on to the meshed catwalk and turned to hand Rat, Shalleme, Ollivet’t, then myself among rising cables, descending hooks and pulleys.

I looked back.

A few were coming towards the doorway. One dropped to all sixes to run.

From Shalleme: ‘But where are we—’

JoBonnot said, ‘Your friend Skya Santine is waiting for us in the interlevel,’ and did something so that the door, much faster than it had opened, closed, shutting out our pursuers. The railed lift we were standing on lowered.

Ollivet’t reared to stare at the overhead machinery.

Shalleme leaned over the rail to gaze down.

‘Marq?’ from the shadows. ‘JoBonnot, did you find them?’

I called: ‘Santine?’

The tracer’s bulk came up. The lift shuddered, locked, and Santine leaned from the tank’s outrider. A bar light came on beside her, glistening along her flank. ‘Hop aboard. Well, it looks like you’ve brought a whole party.’ Santine was alone. ‘This way.’

Squatting to examine the rail catch, Shalleme pushed
something; the rail rose. She stood, looking at us to see if she shouldn’t have pushed.

‘Come on,’ Santine called again.

From JoBonnot: ‘Go, now.’ She herded us towards the machine.

‘Climb in!’ Santine moved back from the forward outrigger; JoBonnot pulled herself up.

We climbed on at mid-platform where cadets had ridden that morning. A bar light on one side of the tunnel went off; two on the other came on. Shalleme gave Ollivet’t a hand; she came, forefeet, middle, and rear, a furl of red wing-lining showing beside her bright tourist vest.

Rat, in his roughened voice, asked: ‘Where are we going?’

‘Anywhere you like.’ Santine grinned. ‘The crowd won’t follow us here. We can get you back to Dyethshome if you want. Or, if you’d prefer, you can visit with me in my room on Dylleat for a while – ’

In her white skullcap, JoBonnot swung her head back around the drive housing. ‘I would delay returning to Dyethshome were I you. By now, that’s where everybody expects you to be. That is to say, you will be fairly traceable there, and not only by tracers. And for at least another hour or so, all the curious in Morgre will be trying to find you, now you’ve actually been spotted.’

Ollivet’t exchanged glances with Shalleme, who leaned against the corner of the rear housing, red-sleeved arms folded over the fringed edges of her tourist jumpsuit, open below her navel. She said: ‘We’ve reserved a visitor’s room down in the Abakreg’gia – ’

‘– Perhaps you could take us there?’ Ollivet’t’s black eyes gleamed. She glanced around at Shalleme. ‘Or take us somewhere from which we could
get
there?’

‘We’ll pick up our scooters at …’ Shalleme stood up
now and unfolded her arms – ‘… Dyethshome. We’ll pick them up tomorrow.’

Once more JoBonnot’s head swung back around the tracer’s cab: ‘My honourable Skyshottyn, would you welcome our group to your rooms in the Abakreg’gia, if by doing so you could render great aid to troubled women?’

Once more the foreign hunters exchanged looks. ‘Why should we refuse?’ declared, or better declaimed, Ollivet’t in a rumbling basso. Come share our space a while. And perhaps you can explain some of this confusion.’

‘By all means, generous Skynosheani.’ JoBonnot swung back and out of sight.

The tracer tank lurched on its fat treads. Ollivet’t and Santine immediately sat on their rear haunches.

Rat looked at both and squatted on the plates, ringed hand on the floor, swaying.

Shalleme took hold of the support-bar on the back cabin wall and stayed standing, watching now the tiles, now the girders, now the stone walls of the passing interlevel.

I put a steady hand on Santine’s scaled neck and bent. ‘Where in the world did she learn to drive a tracer?’ I whispered into the ridged auditory plate within the curved flaps of dark flesh just before her gill-ruff.

Santine stuck a smaller tongue out the corner of her mouth and said in the blurred boom that serves evelmi for a whisper: ‘Probably from the driver-instruction program I revised for our local GI service about fifteen years – ’ and another tongue, somewhere on the other side of her mouth, roared, ‘standard,’ and (as Rat and Ollivet’t glanced over) went back to the whisperer, ‘ago now.’

I scowled at Santine’s left eye, which blinked at me.
‘What I mean, Santine, is where could she have come from?’

Santine turned her whole large face towards me. ‘Given the honorific system she uses, Marq, the chances are high she comes from Klabanuk … wouldn’t you think?’ Santine has never been offworld; but, prompted by her friendship with me, she’s done a good deal of otherworldly exploration in vaurine. Years back most of her trips had been limited to worlds I’d worked
₁
on, but she’d branched out since.

‘Where’s Klabanuk?’

A bar light on the left swooped its violet across plates and flesh and rails and scales. Santine swivelled her head to me again. ‘It’s an open-run junction about twelve kilometres outside Hysy’oppi Complex – and Hysy’oppi, in case you’ve forgotten, is about fourteen hundred kilometres north, in G-19.’

I frowned as another passing bar light lit our faces for each other. ‘Hysy’oppi is where you were born!’ I said, and looked down at Santine’s aluminium-coloured claws which darkened to gun-metal as our tank lurched around another unlighted curve.

‘With all your star stepping, I’d wondered if you’d remember.’

I looked at the forward housing, somewhere to the side of which, and out of sight, the tall woman guided us along the bar lit dark. ‘Santine, what’s the difference between a Skina and Skyochot?’

‘I told you, Klabanuk was twelve kilometres away from where I was brought up; though I heard it enough when I was a child, I never bothered to learn the dialect.’

We leaned around another corner; and the notion that this odd woman, whom I’d first seen almost a year and a galactic diameter away, hailed from only fourteen hundred kilometres to the west was enough to totally confuse.
My mind leapt among explanations, from Santine’s possible mendacity to the possibility JoBonnot herself was a free-agented professional
₁
of a cunning to dwarf that of her erstwhile companion, Clym.

I looked at Rat, who still squatted beside Ollivet’t, his bear hand over one knee, the other, on the plate, five fingers in a jewelled pentagon about which the rest of his tall weight swung as he watched slurred mosaics rush by in half-dark.

We lurched as lift grapples caught us. Shalleme, standing, and Korga, squatting, swayed. I nearly toppled as side grapples hooked into our flanks. There are some outlying interlevel drops that actually use black-chain over two hundred years old; but not this one. We lowered down the near vertical slope.

4.

Several centuries ago, a northern tribe developed a ceramic cooker, essentially a large clay pot, called, yes, a kollec, which is where the term used in lizard-perch divination comes from, by way of a metaphoric leap. You put water (or sometimes oil) in the kollec’s bottom, and in on top of that you put a complicated seven-layer shelf with various perforations for rising steam, various ducts to conduct juices down from one layer to bypass another and shower over another still lower. Food on the different shelves cooks at different rates. Juices percolate to form a general gravy at the bottom. Individual essences are collected in draining cups at shelf edges on their respective levels. Elaborate meals can be prepared with a single kollec, and in a number of northern cities humans have all but taken it over for their own foods – omitting the inedible flavoured stones and unchewable barks that still
make up a large part of Velmian cookery but that we humans in the south are learning to appreciate if not actually enjoy.

The seven-level urban complexes, sunk all over the variegated surface of Velm, have been compared to kollecs in drama, song, poem, and philosophical meditation so often, all over this world, that it has somehow passed beyond cliché to become a sort of classical figure by which Velmian artists of all races signify (almost always in the antepenultimate act of the work) that the drama is to be read as aspiring to a certain ambition.

Abakreg’gia is under the base of the kollec, where the flames lick the bottom.

When Morgre was sunk in ’43, ancient caves were uncovered, just as the workers reached the lowest point of the excavation, dating from perhaps a million and a quarter years prior to human arrival. (Could this have been the original Arvin? Yes, it could.) Work on the city was halted for three days; three days were devoted to detailed excavation, which was recorded in vaurine. Then the building of the city recommenced. Instead of filling the caves in, however, since they were at a depth below the official bottom of the city, they were turned into subcity dwellings.

Five or six huge light globes hung like minor parodies of Iiriani in the sub-urban hollow. The small apartments had been refurnished just as closely to the primitive forms as the Velmian archaeologists could reconstruct at the time; then necessary modern conveniences were added. Velmian tourists can enjoy them for weeks at a time, and humans who are not addicted to the light of a real sun can usually enjoy a few days in the falsely lit darkness. We walked along the upper apartment ring of g’gia-9. The nearest light, fifty metres off in the central auricle,
laid our shadows over the fallen stones and obtruding boulders.

The amphitheatre at Dyethshome was modelled on one in a federation about seven hundred kilometres west at K’l’kl’l, built perhaps four hundred years back. But I have always suspected that the amphitheatre at K’l’kl’l was modelled – with how many intermediaries, no one knows – on the million-and-a-quarter-year-old one excavated right under Morgre, from a time when the Vyalou was radically lower.

We came around another rock outcrop.

‘Here,’ Shalleme said, her eyes momentarily closed to consult the GI track guiding her.

The door was a curtain of flexible struts of immature tolgoth, which was the functional approximation the evelm archaeologists could come up with to stick into the mysterious perforations along the upper lintel. The floor mat was old netmoss. The webbed wall hangings were based on ‘primitive’ designs from the Judedd’ji excavations at the South Pole, so only half a million years out of date.

There were several modern stools.

There were two modern tables.

And modern means designed to be sat on (or at) by both humans and evelmi.

A holographic window showed a section of Fayne-Vyalou, rather like the one we had hunted in today, supposed to be rather like the landscape around here when all this was above ground.

Ollivet’t turned and extended her broad undertongue, in which she had obviously carried water for a day or two now, from their home. With an overtongue, she said: ‘Welcome to our provisional habitat, all my friends, close, near and distant.’

Shalleme bent to touch her tongue to the liquid puddling the mottled flesh; then Rat; then me; then Santine; and finally JoBonnot. With each of them I watched for individualizing motions and movements, but even though I could sense them, I cannot articulate what they were.

Shalleme went over to the wall cabinets to see what stones had been provided. (Rat moved to the side of the door, folded his arms, and stood for all the world as though waiting for instructions.) Ollivet’t went about placing her heavy claws first on one rug-covered cushion pile, then another, to test for comfort, lumps, or sharp things left under wraps. Santine went to one Ollivet’t had already plumped, tested it herself first with a forefoot, then a middle, then a hind, and curled down on to it, tail, tufts, and chin – then raised her chin a moment and purred appreciatively: ‘Marq, when was the last time you were here?’

I went to another cushioned pile Olivet’t had tested and sat down cross-legged. ‘Ten years ago at the least.’ I wondered if Rat would join me, but he stood, observing from black sockets.

‘It’s always been a strange place for me,’ Santine said affably. ‘With a whole seven layers of city hanging above you in the dark, sometimes women here will be hit with intense claustrophobia. Yet standing on the upper level of the apartment ring, looking over the broken tiers of the million-year-old amphitheatre to the skene nearly two hundred metres down, the restored tiles glimmering, many also experience sudden vertigo. As a young woman, I recall coming here and going from one to the other in the space of seconds.’

Shalleme had stretched out on her own cushion; and Ollivet’t, who had finally found some flavour-stones, came back past her with several in her foreclaws. She went up to Rat and offered him one.

I guess he’d been on Velm long enough to learn that whenever you don’t know what to do with something here, lick it. After looking at it for the length of three breaths, he raised the rock in both hands to his mouth to taste.