Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (49 page)

‘You just go out there to stage centre. Marq, maybe
you could introduce Rat. Like Bazaret introducing the show.’

‘Huh?’ I said. ‘Oh, yeah. Sure.’ Well, isn’t that part of a diplomat’s job? ‘We’ll just stand …’ I took Rat’s arm – ‘over here?’

‘The very spot from which Kand’ri herself delivered the Ambassador David’s famous seventh-act soliloquy. Oh, this is exciting!’ Mima stepped to the side of the stage. ‘You would like to see your audience, wouldn’t you? Bazaret didn’t. But Sejer’hi and Kond’ri wouldn’t perform if they couldn’t. They said that’s what made it
folk
theatre, you see?’

‘I guess so.’ I glanced up at Rat, but his eyes, hollowed in the darkness, looked out on the empty seats.

‘Good,’ Mima said. ‘Because that’s the only way I know how to do it.’

‘You’d better hurry,’ Japril said, from where she and the others had gathered behind the fountain. ‘Marta says more are coming. And Ynn – ’

‘All right.’ Mima closed her eyes.

The sensation was exactly like that ambiguous up-down fall through a limen plate.

A cloud-streaked night. I looked about. A dark rectangular plate stood behind us to the left. Another stood to the right. In front of us, or rather in front and below, there were detailed shapes, and small lights among them – and we must have been visible on the freestanding multichrome walls above Dyethshome; hopefully, the crowds moving up had now stopped their forward surge and possibly were even allowing the ones in front to move backwards a little. And I realized what Rat and I were gazing down over: the upper park levels of Morgre, their rails crowded with women, then women behind them, and behind them more, standing by the pole lights, gazing towards Dyethshome. I glanced down. Below the
dark domes just at my feet (the court roofs), figures crowded the forecourt. On the rollerway up between the cactus, figures milled and pushed and jostled. I gazed down at it all from some two hundred metres; above the roofs of our cooperative, the city before us was an astonishing playroom toy.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. My voice sounded boomy and distorted. ‘I am Marq Dyeth, and this is Rat Korga, the survivor whom you have all gathered to see – no, please. Move backwards, not forwards. Those of you out around Water Alley,
please
move back. You are endangering the lives of those nearer Dyethshome. You can all see from where you are. Please, don’t move forward any more. This is a matter of life. If those of you there and there –’ I pointed – ‘can all move back ten steps …’

I saw it happen; and also realized how large our image must have appeared because I saw how small their motions were.

‘Good. Still, if those there and there can move back, say, fifteen more steps.’

They did it. ‘Thank you. You must start to move people away from the grounds of Dyethshome. There is still room up in the upper park level, and the view is probably better from there anyway.’ Here and there what had been a clear forward motion began to, swirl, and then reverse. ‘Thank you. Again, I want to introduce to you …’ I started to say,
my friend
, but thought better: ‘Rat Korga, the survivor of Rhyonon, who has come to visit our world, our city.’

I glanced up at Rat beside me. ‘Rat, will you … uh, say something to the women here at Morgre?’

He seemed so real beside me, gazing. I wondered if he recognized what he looked at, or the change of scale that accompanied it, or indeed if it mattered. ‘I am Rat Korga. As my friend, Marq Dyeth, said.’ The accent that in a
day I had almost grown used to, now that I knew thousands heard it, seemed as intrusive as when I’d heard his first words. ‘Thank you. That is all I can say to you. I have no world, now; and its destruction hurt me in many ways. Thank you for letting me visit yours.’

I looked about again, as Korga seemed to have said what he had to say. ‘May we ask you,’ I said, ‘to return to your living rooms. Rat Korga has been with us a day, and has already walked in our streets, moved through our runs within the city, hunted dragons on the sands outside it. But by this disruption of your own lives, by gathering to see Rat here, you only disrupt his and ours as well. I know as you go about our city, from centre to rim to centre, many of you will pass him and will extend the same courtesy to him you have extended to visitors in our clime for centuries now. Many visitors have stayed to call this, our world, home …’ I looked at Rat and wondered what I was trying to say, wondered why my single tongue stumbled now saying it. ‘The complex of flavours that awaits each of us is unique, interrupted only by sleep and ended only with death.’ It’s a hopeless cliché, and where it came from, to spring out of my mouth just then, I later wondered for hours. ‘Return to the flavours of your lives and let us again take up ours. You’ve come to see Rat Korga, and you have. Please go, now, so that we may go on. Good night.’

As I glanced at Rat again, with his wide shoulders and hollow eyes, I saw he had raised his bare, big hand to those who stared up at us, with neither distress not humour on his long, pitted face.

2.

Out between low hills was the smaller more distant toy.

‘… I have no world, now; and its destruction hurt me in many ways. Thank you for letting me visit yours.’ Above the courts’ five domes, projected on the freestanding walls, a tall doll and a short doll stood together. ‘… the complex of flavours that awaits each of us is unique, interrupted only by sleep and ended only with …’ The comscreen, sticking above my desk’s clutter, concluded the replay Mima had thoughtfully made.

Rat sat on my bed. ‘Why did we come here?’

I walked across the orange carpet to the desk. ‘Formal suppers always have intermissions, where everybody retires for a while. There’re waiting-rooms for the guests to use. With all the confusion, Max and Shoshana thought this might be a good time to have it.’ I glanced at the small, planetary spheres about the suspended lamp globe. They began to circle, each with its swarm of tiny moons.

‘I’m still hungry,’ Rat said. ‘I didn’t eat much.’

‘No one ever really does at formal affairs. You just put in a lot of work doing it. But there’ll be the pickings once it’s all finished. Late-night snacks after these things are not to be believed.’ I came around the desk and leaned my hip on it. Behind Rat, fire cactus bent thick branches in a warm gust. Falling needles ticked the rail. ‘This has been quite an evening. I still don’t know what the Thants were on about. All those things they were saying – those idiotic statements – they made me feel as if I were living on some world out of history where all that we do here was against the law!’

Rat said: ‘No, they didn’t.’

I frowned.

‘They didn’t make you feel that way. That’s the way they made me feel.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘You didn’t grow up on such a world. You didn’t spend your childhood and make your transition to maturity on a world where bestiality and homosexuality were legally proscribed. So you do not possess the fund of those feelings to draw on. I do.’

‘But they spoke to me as much as …’ I felt confused and angry again.

‘They come from such a world,’ Rat said, looking down at his lap. ‘Otherwise, it would never have occurred to them to say such things.’

‘… but the north,’ I said. ‘In the north of this world, at least up till comparatively recently, bestiality … as you call it, was illegal.’

‘Before I came here, they told me as much about the north of your world as they did about the south.’ Rat’s eyes, in the lamp light, moved now to human, now to hollow (and the all-black eyes of the evelmi, in such light, frequently look hollow). ‘Is the north your world?’

‘More than it is yours.’

‘I have no world, Marq Dyeth.’

I stepped towards him in what I thought was anger – and suddenly reeled within the combative flavours of desire. I shook my head, to see that he, standing, had stepped towards me. And knew that the desire we felt would not be consummated now. And at the same time I watched all sensations in me that were not desire fade on my tongue (metaphors of taste are so inadequate to describe what in reality is an appetite!) so that I was finally licked all round by it, till I almost fell, and would not because he did not fall.

More fire-needles dropped. A breeze (and we were
only millimetres apart) took the physical warmth from between us that would have done for contact.

‘Rat Korga?’

It was Japril’s voice on the comscreen, and I was the one who stepped suddenly back. (It was his hand, halted under its jewelled weight, that reached forward – and, possibly because of that weight, did not quite touch me.)

‘Marq, I’d like to see Rat. I’m in the south court. It’s important …’

I didn’t speak.

But seconds later, Rat turned and walked to the metal plate in the corner of my rug.

‘Rat’s on his way, Japril.’

I sat down at the desk, while Japril’s face dissolved to abstract colours. I wasn’t breathing hard; but I seemed aware of every alveolus as it filled with air to froth the bloody rush. My heart was not beating more strongly; but the slippage of muscle fibre against muscle fibre seemed to create a friction I could feel.

‘Marq Dyeth!’

I sat, terribly conscious of the juncture of foot and rug, buttock and bench.

‘Hey – Marq?’

I looked up, where George Thant materialized in the column, bronze, transparent, swaying in the view-light where, moments before. Rat had been.

‘Don’t answer me, if you want. I don’t care – ’ Her words were slurred. I wondered what she’d eaten or drunk so much of as to half-drug herself. ‘Marq, let me in – !’

I thought through the entrance code out of habit, the way the first notes of a melody – George’s demand – produce the concluding ones without real effort. She staggered forward, then caught her balance. ‘So. This is where you run off to, hey?’

‘George,’ I said. ‘Look, I’m not sure what you and your folks are doing. But a lot’s been going on here that – ’

‘Well, we’re sure what you’ve been doing – you
and
your folks.’ She shook a big metallic finger at me; then the gesture lost focus, and she reached up to rub her bald, bronze head. Looking about through brazen lids, she took a few more steps. ‘Here, I’ve finally made it into one of your lizard-lover’s inner sanctums.’

And Rat was right. As an insult it only seemed odd.

‘Now what do I find? That your world’s just the same as mine!’ She looked around again. ‘This is no different from my room, a sun and a world and sixty-eight thousand light-years away. Not a puff of difference.’ She came up to the desk. ‘Did you know that? There, in the cells of 17, cut into our canyon walls – you call yours Dyethshome, we call ours Thantspace – my living room is
just
like yours. Here – ’ I a crisp motion belying whatever drug her staggering had mimed, she grasped my desk edge, pulled out the small control drawer from under the lip, and reached inside. ‘I’ll show you!’

‘George,’ I said, ‘what are you –?’

George twisted things inside, knocked others with her knuckles, flattened still more under her polished palm.

‘George,
what
in the –?’

Stars and clouds went out.

The hills, with Morgre between, vanished. George laughed. Fire cactus faded. Somewhere the stream ceased to plash. Bed and desk and rail and carpet disappeared.

Three metres by three metres, my living room’s wall plates had once been sprayed, probably back in Ari’s time, with a translucent green gum that had now worn off the centre of the floor, showing tarnished blotches. Where the metal bolt-heads were deeply inset, some of the coating had pulled loose, though after a century it still
accomplished its major job: to keep any random chemical reaction in the walls’ surface from adding some upsetting order to the image the plates could be excited to project.

George, no longer bronze and not quite as tall, stood by the control post that slanted up, off centre, in the pentagonal floor. ‘Same technology. Same everything … Not a bit different from mine.’

I uncrossed my legs, feeling warm metal uncomfortable under my buttocks, and started to stand – even three years ago I could still get up from a cross-legged position on the floor in a single motion. But now I had to push myself up to my knees, roll around a little, and then get one foot under me, shove, and then another. ‘George,’ I said. ‘You are rude beyond bearing – which is no news. But this takes all!’

George was looking at her arm, thinner than it had been. Above her elbow was a small sore. ‘That’s not supposed to be there, she said. ‘At least not now. Oh, this is crazy … !’

Projection lenses lost their glow and retracted into the ceiling. Two metal doors clicked closed over them. (Three others did not, which meant some of the backup circuits were no longer working. But the room was overdetermined by a factor of seven, which meant
maybe
my great-great-great-granddaughter might have to have one or two repairs done before she moved in.) ‘I don’t know …’ George shook her head, where, without the projection, there was at least three weeks’ growth of hair. ‘But – well, I guess …’ She looked at the green, irregularly shaped walls. ‘No, it’s
not
that much like mine, really. Mine’s cubical – and the realspace must be half again the size of this. I bet some sociometrician could make a good argument that’s why I have my personality and you have yours.’ Teeth together, lips pulled back, she rubbed one thick thumb over that sore. ‘Shit …’

‘Get out of here,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but at this point I don’t
want
to know!’

‘You don’t?’ George looked up, glowering. ‘Nea tells you that we’re trying to take over the position of Focus Unit on Nepiy; you report our takeover to the Web; we come to confront you and receive your accusation directly – tonight the place is crawling with Web officials! Now you claim you “don’t
know
what we’re doing”?
I
said no, that’s not the Dyeths’ style. But Thadeus said: “You just watch! We’ll go there, try to make an honourable showing. Will they say a thing? They’ll have the odd Web officer just standing around, as if they just happened to be invited for some other purpose entirely. Chances are, they won’t even have told her yet. They’ll tell her after we go. They think that’s stylish.” Well, we’re leaving your stylish, decadent, beastly little world. And when we leave, we’re going to Nepiy. And we’re going to take it over. And neither you nor the Web can stop us.’