Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Read online

  They were gone.

  I was left, amidst the other children, furred or fleshed, fingered or clawed, to tell myself endless stories over the next years as to why, for a few hours, that child had been there. The most obvious answer? He and a parent had been passing through Morgre and the child had simply been left off at the nursery to play a while. But not a year standard has gone by when, in some lone moment, I haven’t enhanced on some recomplication of a human child’s and a black-scaled beast’s adventuring together across my world, during which, momentarily, I glimpsed an instant of it: their joined hands within a strange nursery under leaf-shadowed light.

  2

  A grandmother of mine was an Industrial Diplomat. So was one of my mothers. But though two of my female siblings share the vocation, I am the only male of my ripple to take on Industrial Diplomacy as my primary profession – a profession1, I sometimes slip into thinking of as the Dyeths’ traditional calling now for three of our seven waves. And suddenly this memory – recent, adult, insistent, yet trivial:

  Walking across the green terraces, home from some job1 or other, both eager to see them and uneasy over the prospect of all that food and fellow feeling, as the oestern court’s black and silver wall rose on its humming treads to reveal some visiting aunt, who turned ponderously behind the Dyethshome amphitheatre’s ornate railing, a long fork waving from one midclaw, to call first with one tongue, then with another: ‘But of course!’ going from vibrant basso to treble: ‘I know you! You’re one of my marvellous little human relatives! Now you’re …?’ and couldn’t remember my name to save herself.

  But with this interruption, among all possible streaming memories, I find myself turning to another, again, earlier.

  The true possibility of my becoming an Industrial Diplomat (Marq Dyeth, auntie! Marq Dyeth!) no doubt goes back at least to the year I spent offworld with my grandmother Genya. Well under one per cent of the population of any world will ever set foot on any other. Vaurine tours satisfy the wanderlust of the rest. Still, we could; and she thought it was a Good Thing. So we went a star away and I waited on the wet moon, called Senthy, of a gas giant that, itself, had no name but only a number, while Genya snarled and unsnarled herself from the Web, and I mooned about the rust-blotched plates of the administrative hangars’ tall doors outside the new spaceport, mumbling over lessons fed directly into my mind by a voice with a strange accent and prompted by visual aids – the image of some locally engineered amphibious kangaroo stopping you on the crumbly black path – whose colours always seemed too intense for the green clouded horizon against which they were projected.

  A year later we were back on Velm, in the Fayne-Vyalou, at Morgre, Genya happy to be home and angry at the Web policies that had made the return so precipitate; and I settled into a more usual routine – usual for someone like me in a situation like mine on my particular world. In my particular place on it. Only now I’d had a year to see how unusual, in universal terms, my usual could be. Certainly such knowledge ripened me for the memory I wish to recount:

  Twelve years old, then, and studying with the tracers, I find this persists as strongly as the memory from the nursery. An apprentice, I was assigned to accompany some older cadets down into one of Morgre’s lower interlevels. I remember cables moving above us. I remember echoing breaths and wide wings. I remember mica glimmering in the rock walls under the burning purple of the shoulder lamps.

  A manufacturing union had used the upper shelves of this space for storing several tons of corrosive muck that should have been carried out to the desert months before. Turned out to be more corrosive than they’d thought. Next thing, the report arrived that it had dripped, dripped, dripped, trickled, then poured down through the eaten-away container bottoms and shelving on to some V-lifts, ratchet diggers, and transport sleds stored below. Most of them had been ruined, and tracers1, roused from their sleep before dawn, had come in, tasted, tested, and foamed the place with blacklime to neutralize the corrosion. Now our group of tracers2, cadets (and one apprentice: me), were coming to dig out what had to be dug and send what had been tagged, with little green plastic discs, swinging off on the salvage lines thrumming in the dark. Two males, both of us human, were among the winged females and neuters that day. I guess people notice such things, but where do you learn it’s not necessary to comment on them?

  Not, apparently, where the other human male was from. This one? About twenty-five – possibly thirty. It was certainly old enough to me, and the behaviour was that which I would later come to associate with many humans from my world’s north. A tracer1, this male had taken a temporary job2 here while travelling in the south. Oh, there was much of making it clear that our friend’s sexual tastes were for the greater winged neuters, with much bantering apology to the smaller, gorgeously winged females, allowing how, on the part of our world she came from (Katour?), interracial heterosexuality was, indeed, the most prevalent perversion; but she was different and liked them big … at the same time, demonstrating much parental affection for me, as a young human: hugs, jokes, her rough black gloves with their simulated steel claws on my shoulder a lot. (She’d had scales set permanently into the flesh of her muscular back, which, as I had never seen that before, I found both intriguing and mildly repulsive.) Boisterous, bumptious, and – to perhaps a third of the women there – charming in one way or another. Still, as far as anything I might have considered true intercourse there was nothing for me.

  In purple glimmer, we found the mucky mess.

  ‘Here, yes. You, little one,’ the woman in charge said with one tongue:

  ‘You hold this, Dyeth.’

  ‘I mean hold the light here.’

  So I did, leaning against some unsteady slab of peeling plastic, while the rest slopped forward among sticky industrial units. The foreign male pulled off her gloves, which chittered up to her belt on little chains wound into spring pulleys there –

  Then somebody knocked against something; something started to topple.

  ‘Catch it! … Hey, watch –! … What the –! … Hold it! Hold –’ from a good many more tongues than cadets.

  My beam was focused on tight, and it swung up to catch claw after claw reaching to hold something large, metallic, and filthy. Among the claws, slipping and pushing, a pair of human hands grasped the riveted edge. Big, soiled fingers: another nail-biter, he – wouldn’t you know? I thought it just like that, the shift in pronoun coming just that simply, with a warmth and pleasure flowering in the danger that had already begun to resolve:

  ‘Yeah, steady! steady! … We got it … No, just a – There, there, now! … There it is!’ in multiple, languid bassos, with the occasional human pitch cutting through.

  Among the evelmi claws that moved about his (yes, that’s what I thought), over his, or that, now reaching for another grip, his moved over, one claw had three of its talons smashed from some former accident, so that they were just splintered bits of horn sticking from the black hide. It kind of made me wince, and I wondered which of the women that claw belonged to.

  As they settled back upright whatever it was that had almost fallen, I twisted the light beam into a wider circle, so that it expanded to include the dark-scaled heads, the rearing arms, the wings, the midlegs supporting the metal further down its runny side. And suddenly I stopped – thinking? Breathing? Something unquestioned and headlong within me had come up short:

  The human hands were not the foreign male’s,– who was standing, I saw now, a little ways away, head shaking, neck rubbing, the gloves back on, as if replaced to fend the anxiety of nearly being crushed.

  A muscular, human female, whom I’d hardly noticed among the several in the group, let her big hand slip from the dirty metal plate, to laugh with relief among the rest. And the claw with the broken talons belonged to a wingless male, who backed away on hind legs now, turning a bony head and tasting the air with his tongue and that, the three sections of her black-scaled chest heaving, the front four legs peddling the darkness among t
he gesticulations of the other tracer2 cadets …

  The foreign male stood, grinning, dirty …

  In a kind of shock, I waited with them while they dug out machines and muck, while they pulled weighing scales up. I helped position refuse crates on them till I was told I was too young to do that and had better just watch. And come on, Dyeth, hold that light up now. Later, I went to the run I’d frequented since I’d been back home, because it welcomed both youngsters and oldsters, and stalked those dim halls the whole evening with a desperation I’ve heard adults say is common among the excitable youth, though I’ve never felt it to the same extent before or since. I searched up and down its mile and a half for hours, and only stopped when I found what I assumed, from their dirt and daykits, to be some returned dragon hunters who’d come here and had, drugged on what I didn’t know, fallen asleep in an alcove. The human male in the party, who I rolled over on his back, was stocky (like me), bearded and hairy (like I would someday be), and not much taller than I was, with thick hands still stained with the sands from outside the city. When I finished with him, only half-responsive in his interrupted sleep, he folded those hands around my chest; and I slept against the stranger for an hour, while claws padded about us, a tongue now tasting my foot, my ear, my hands, or his; and all that watched us were the statues’ faces, some with eyes, some without.

  When I got home I did something I’ve done only perhaps six times in my life: I cut my nails, usually a normal length, usually clean (like now), as short as I could, till the nubs hurt, some of them even bleeding a little, and squatted on the green flags to rub them painfully in the dirt beside the pool in the front yard before our yard – till my mother, Max, came out to ask what in the world I was doing.

  All I could do was say that, honestly, I didn’t know.

  I wanted to tell you just of those two images, you see: the hands – human and evelm – I saw in the nursery and the hands – evelm and human – that I saw struggling together in the interlevel in my beam. The curve those fingers made, those talons formed, were parentheses marking out something I’ve always felt totally within me, solid as home itself. Yet what is between them works to disrupt that totality, both from home itself and from worlds beyond it. The same goes for what is outside them. Why, for instance, are they split by the memory of that aunt (if she was an aunt) who could not remember my name? Perhaps because, with the Family trying to establish the dream of a classic past as pictured on a world that may never even have existed in order to achieve cultural stability, and with the Sygn committed to the living interaction and difference between each woman and each world from which the right stability and play may flower, in a universe where both information and misinformation are constantly suspect, reviewed and drifting as they must be (constantly) by and between the two, a moment when either information or misinformation turns out to be harmless must bloom, when surrounded by the workings of desire and terror, into the offered sign of all about it, making and marking all about it innocent by contamination.

  3.

  Which brings me to the second time I heard of Rhyonon or Rat Korga.

  Jump weeks, worlds, stars away from them all – my home, Free-Kantor, that plane of rotting vines.

  The new job1 was herding machines up and out of the frozen ammonia sludge of southern Ydris across one thousand seven hundred light-years to the butane winds roaring about the canyons of northern Krush. What kind of machines? The large mechanical sort, with moving parts and switches you couldn’t just talk into opening or closing. In my tiny cell of the tremendous stellar freighter, I suddenly began to receive those distressing messages that basically suggest that the job1 is being woven through by all sorts of restraining strands from the Web. Finally, there on some station hovering among Krush’s six moons above that deep green disc (a coppery sand, not vegetation), much to the blustering frustration of my new employer, somewhere down on that heavy world below, the whole thing was called off.

  Spiders purred: ‘When you began, the Sygn was up and the Family down in that geosector of Krush. But since then, it’s reversed. And I’m afraid the conflict has necessitated terminating your project …’ So, despite all my descriptions and redescriptions, the hulking, clanking, greasy cargo was shunted off towards Krush’s hot little sun into which it would never actually fall because it would have already vanished, blown away as so much scalding mist.

  Then the so friendly invitation from a high-ranking Black Widow that you cannot afford to refuse if you want to stay in my profession1: ‘By Okk, I think you should come to a little conference the Web’s holding out about seven light-years in towards the centre! We can bring you up to date on what’s operable and what isn’t in this particular cluster.’ It’s good business since they have to pay the kill-fee on the job. ‘It changes so rapidly in this situation …’

  The ‘situation’, of course, is the conflict between the Family and the Sygn: in their differing methods of preventing Cultural Fugue – largely on worlds (as more than one commentator has noted) where it wasn’t very likely to happen anyway. Still, as the interstellar agency in charge of the general flow of information about the universe in many places, the Web is near to being torn apart by the fracas. The first ripple of Dyeths sat just on the edge of that fracas, watching, yes, but (according to one version) completely above such adolescent hugger-mugger, or (according to another, that you have to go rather far afield of any Dyeth to hear) green with envy that we were not in the centre of those romantic schemes. After all, my seven-times great-grandmother Gylda Dyeth worked for the Family potentate, pontiff, and poet, Vondramach Okk, doing for her, I like to think, much of what I do now for employers1 all over the habitable worlds. Common sense, however, tells me it must have been a much darker enterprise she was involved in. Vondramach herself, with her own dark beginnings and darker demise, was at one point sole ruler of seventeen worlds – four of which destroyed themselves in Cultural Fugue (ands that’s a lot!), while the Sygn, in those pre-Web days, was the most famous institution in the worlds. That’s real wealth; that’s real fame – of a sort that simply can’t exist today. The Web won’t let them, thank all the star-flung night!

  At any rate, you go off those seven light-years to some glass and plastic L-5 station, some baroquely subterranean conference centre (from inside you might confuse either one with the corridors of Kantor; and you don’t see much outside these days) and attend seminars and discussion groups and rapid briefing sessions in everything from local ecologies to interworld legalistics, all spiced with endlessly varied teaching aids and opinion-nudgers. You absorb and file away and forget vast amounts of data about what information is, in certain situations, as well as what information is or is not acceptable in this or that part of this or that world.

  It was at one of these that I struck up my acquaintance with Clym. I question now if it was desire that first made me notice … him, the bald little gorilla with the tattoos. Perhaps, despite those leafy emblems above his collar and below his cuffs, it was just easier, in an alien field, to want someone with ankles and cheekbones so much like my own.

  When I first noticed him, he was deep in conversation with a very tall woman whose epicanthic folds flattened a brown, round face. She had a broad nose and an awkward, animated air. They sat together in one of the apricot lounges, gossiping softly, leaning together, smiling a lot, his short muscular body all in black, she, towering and shirtless, wearing a skullcap tight enough to suggest that underneath she had as little hair as he did. The only phrase I actually caught from her was: ‘… by my roots on Eurd, Skychi Clym!’ which suggested that she’d spent time around the Family. Well, I thought, if I had, I wouldn’t advertise it at an official Web function.

  Then, only hours later, she passed me in the hall. Her green metallic pants were probably meant to suggest she was with a world-based advisory group connected with, but not of, the Web – which also seemed incongruous: on a chain around her neck, hanging on the bony place between her breasts, she wore a cyhnk. (Thi
s one was a two-centimetre gold bar with a tangle of gold wires at one end, on each wire’s tip a ruby.) Well, she could be a member of the Sygn. It all seemed ludicrously contradictory. More, it seemed rather naïve, if not impolitic, to flaunt emblems of either – not to mention both – mutually antagonistic faction on what should have been neutral territory controlled by an adversary (the Web) of both.

  But I was talking of Clym. More out of boredom than real lust (for his hands were just like mine), I finally announced: ‘Yes, I believe I would like to make love with you.’ (He had the learning booth just behind mine, and we were always bumping into each other – literally – when we reported for briefing sessions.) Mine the usual trepidation about approaching sexually someone from, probably, a highly different culture. Clym refused, politely enough, I suppose. But he also became far more friendly over the next few days. It was he, finally, who suggested we take a shuttle off somewhere else – anywhere else – during the break. ‘Why don’t we go hit rock?’ was his quaint suggestion.

  4.

  The landscape we ended up in was all red sand and brown stone. Minuscule atmosphere was kept over us by obviously artificial means: an indigo glow ribboned the horizon. A sun was about to rise – or perhaps had just set. We must have been on some large moon, or small world, awaiting planoforming; but I honestly don’t remember which. ‘I do believe,’ Clym sighed, heaving back his shoulders in their tight black covering, ‘that we’re actually out of Web security. Isn’t it nice to know nothing you say here will be used against you?’

  ‘That’s assuming both of us can be trusted.’ But I smiled when I said it.

  Clym glanced at me with very blue eyes – a flower tattooed on his cheek pictured some exotic bloom in different greens, with red and yellow highlights. The faint perfume about him, he’d already told me, was the crenna blossom’s scent, implanted in his sweat glands at the same time the image had been inked under his skin. ‘I know you’re an ID – so you probably have your problems with our data-spinning hosts too. I doubt you’ll be offering them more information than they ask for.’