Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Read online

  As red petals began to close about her, I suddenly touched her arm. ‘I’m sure you will. But you must ask her to be very clear about her intentions towards you. Remember that. It’s very important.’

  ‘Oh, Skyla Marq!’ (Apparently my status had changed; perhaps after one has answered a question …?) ‘Do you think … he really might … that someone like Skoi Clym might even …!’ And the star-flung night alone (and maybe a population of sixty or seventy million) knows what a Skoi might be. ‘This whole experience here, in the Web, has been so thrilling, so expansive, so growth-provoking!’ Her filigreed eyes widened above an open smile. ‘And, by ancient Eurd, to think that someone like Skyotchet Clym might even be interested in …’ Red sealed in it and her cyhnk.

  ‘No one likes advice. Still, remember mine. Please.’ I suppose I had been overcome with an image of the naïve worldling, lost among such intrigues as bloom and blossom in the Web. Clearly she’d been displaying every emblem she could think of to impress the spiders at their spinning, while understanding none of those emblems’ import. ‘Take care of yourself now. Take very serious care. But now you must excuse me.’ Then I went sixty million kilometres away.

  And wished it were sixty million light-years and in another sunsystem.

  The weeks passed. The seminar ended. Then light-years, finally, obliterated mere interplanetary distance.

  What can I say?

  Things like that happen in my profession1. I don’t mean worlds getting destroyed. I mean encounters with the odd creations of our epoch, like Clym. I know about security reclassifications. If I couldn’t check out General Info about Rhyonon, then there was nothing to do but put it out of my mind – sort of.

  3

  Visitors on Velm

  Which is what – sort of – I did.

  Until I got home.

  Home?

  It’s the place you can never visit for the first time, because by the time it’s become ‘home’, you’ve already been there. You can only return. (You can never go home, only go home again.) My home?

  Star-system: Iiriani/Iiriani-prime. (Yes, a double.)

  World: Velm. (No, we never have two soar blobs high in the sky. Iiriani is our sun, and sometimes Iiriani-prime is a blazing star that blues a few degrees of the night or, during some of our days, puts a nova-point in the greenish blue. Iiriani has two more worlds besides Velm, a large one and a small one, neither good for much. Iiriani-prime has a single ball of iron and ice swinging around it called Micha, into whose interior have been sunk a few research stations. And Velm’s got two small moons … like Rhyonon.)

  Geosector: M-81. (What else? Well, we call it the Fayne-Vyalou, locally, after the two large plains, one raised, one not, which make up most of it. It lies surrounded by Velm’s southeastern mountains and mineral oil swamps.)

  Urban complex: Morgre. (The seven levels of the city – four of them underground – are sunk between a hot -wr and a valley in the Myaluth Range. The upper levels, irregularly spaced at different heights, with their great pylons supporting one atop the other atop the other, are recreation areas, spacious parks …)

  Morgre?

  Let me tell you about Morgre.

  2.

  Among urban complexes it’s the third largest in our geosector, which, in world terms, makes it an astonishingly unflamboyant place. If you come expecting one of the great cities of the north – Melchazidor, Ahrun, Katour (with its Grand Triple Run), Eblevelma, or even more southernly Farkit or Hanra’a’sh – you’ll be disappointed.

  I don’t know where the basic design for our world’s urban complexes came from. Still, the notion was that, given a certain amount of successful planoforming, the complexes themselves should be ecologically more or less self-contained, which means they could be sunk just about anywhere – and, over most of our world, they are.

  But Morgre’s site was chosen with some care.

  Where the red rock drape-forms of the Myaluth Range end, a ribbon of hot-swamp – the Hyte-wr – winds out on to the pitted Vyalou Plain. Dozens of species of indigenous gnats, gold, black, and red, swarm above the Hyte’s brackish sludge. During the day the blue erupting fumes are visible for kilometres.

  Years before Morgre proper was sunk, several furniture and tool-making collectives organized themselves along the Hyte-wr’s oestern bank, then called Morgre. (Oh, yes: for reasons no doubt lost in colonial archives, our world has five points on its compass: north, east, south, oest, and west – instead of four or six like most others.) The industrial collectives used the swamp’s natural heat to run their machines, while the tolgoth trees (closer to a kind of cactus) foresting the Hyte-wr’s north shore provided their almost unworkably hard pith for lumber. Processed by an ore-smelting co-op ten kilometres up the narrow Myaluth Pass, sponge-copper and heavier metals were worked into blades, wires, switches, and chips. Chained to their slip-pads with the old-fashioned, black, flat-sided links, the orange ingots had been hauled in along a monoline running part of the three hundred kilometres in from Helk’um Port, where the space shuttles still come in on the lavid plains that hold the circular ridges of ancient craters, eroded away over most of the rest of the world.

  The old monoline’s pentalons have been down for fifty years, but their star-form supports are still clamped, in clusters of five, to the pebble-pocked rocksheets. As children, we used to scooter out over the sarb-grass and silvagorse mortaring the porous stones that footed the Myaluths and, wandering among them, guess at what those metre-wide claws grasping the ground could possibly have been, while the black and green coaches of the present monoline whistled above us on humming cables down into the city.

  The nematode farm at the southern edge of present Morgre claims an unbroken line in their service cooperative going back well before the sinking of Morgre itself. Its founding year is proclaimed in silver letters over its gates: 2,521 Web Standard. Silver is common on Velm – about as common as calcium was supposed to be (according to Family historians) on Earth. For years, 2,521 was the most repeatedly mentioned date in Morgre’s local facribbons, which, after the six o’clock, two o’clock, and ten o’clock shift-breaks, twisted and blew along the edge of the ground-level alleys where the workers2 discarded them – wafting towards the gulping grills of the quietly bellowing cleaners, for all the world like the blue smokes curling over the Hyte.

  When I was ten (proportionately more stocky, substantially less hairy), I joined a chemistry study-group in which two of my older groupies worked on the wormfarm with their parents. Soon, half the kids in the group had trial jobs2 there. For me, it was sorting spawn samples into glass vials on a dusty plank table, while the shadow of the window pole, from Velm’s larger moon, swung across the floor to give way to the dawning light of, first, our larger, then our minuscule, sun. I thought then that the huge cooling pits outside, the racks of ten- and fifteen-metre strainers casting chequered shadows over the broken fields, and especially the dirt clotting the underground support beams holding up the roofs of the kilometres on kilometres of catacombs where most of the adults worked, must all go back to the founding. Everything, including you, stays so dirty on a nematode farm – which, to a kid like me from Dyethshome, was half the fun. Later, as a teenager, I saw some pictures of the original farm co-op, c. 2,521: a bunch of grinning, grimy women, some human, some evelm, in odd-looking work outfits (bare chests; oddly panelled skirts), toiling on land a fiftieth the size it is now, using hand-strainers and pick-axes on a bit of yield-soil the size of the skene in the Dyethshome amphitheatre.

  Such violence to the known turns home into history.

  What actually brought Morgre here, however, was the Retreat of the Arvin. I’ve never thought of my world as one where the Family had real influence, yet I know (human) Family adherents from the north first came to the sparsely populated south and built their retreat on the site where a few local evelmi vaguely thought an ancient temple may once have stood. (Which is the Family in a dyllhull for you.) Its glacine cases housed the gold i
nch, the silver metre, the platinum centimetre bars, the vibrating quartz crystals measuring out nanoseconds and Standard Years, the plastic molecular models of human DNA, all lovingly imported (supposedly) from world to world, their origin supposed to be the original Old Eyrth. Completing a swing that had already finished in the north and that had no doubt driven the settlers here, the religious revolution which made the Sygn the official dogma of this world arrived in the south; but it was carried out in our area fairly peacefully, well before anyone thought to construct a city. A bunch of locals – some concerned evelmi, some enlightened humans – came round, so goes the tale, and said with lots of tongues at once: ‘Get this tasteless garbage out of here!’ and unlike some places throughout the six thousand worlds I could name, there were no staunch objections. (The riots in the polar caves of Minjin-IX; the burnings, the mass slayings among the floating labyrinths on the magma fields of Nok Hardrada …) Of course the Sygn wanted to find the name of the deity or dedicatee of the ‘temple’ on the original site: Arvin is Velm’s smaller moon, which by night looks no larger than Iiriani-prime by day. And Arvin was the best they could come up with, since concepts like ‘temple’, ‘deities’, ‘ancient’, ‘dedicatees’, and even ‘name’ just didn’t fit into the local evelmi culture at the time the way humans might have expected. What replaced the imported holy objects in the newly-renamed-with-its-more-or-less-old-name ‘Retreat of the Arvin’ was, among other things, the earliest vaurine library in the area – where, two hundred fifty years later, I went to see the old projections of the wormfarm, actually. Indeed, some of the original measurement standards – in their original cases, say the little cards under them – were eventually returned to the museum. Since the Sygn is concerned with preserving the local history of local spaces, the Family occupation of the retreat was now part of that history.

  So there you are.

  Indeed, I only learned the dogma actually practised there was part of the Sygn after I’d spent that year off-world with my Grandmother Genya on Senthy. (The long, thin parks with their sudden curves at the end, where the pockmarked fisherwomen, waiting for work, walked up and down, up and down, under the high transparent roofs stained a perpetual brown by Senthy’s rusty rains.) There I’d seen rituals, cyhnks, and services so vastly different from the ones here at home as to be unrecognizable: then the return, to discover that – the Sygn itself, which is only a name, pronounced a thousand different ways, spelled differently in a hundred different languages – was all it was: but one of Sygn’s most widely spread tenets (and, like everything else in the Sygn dogma, it, too, no matter how wide, does not obtain everywhere) is that history is what is outside, in both time and space, the current moment of home. And without history, there is no home. A second tenet that usually (though, like all else, not always) goes along with the first: when you go to a new world, all you can take of your home is its history. And if you are a woman, your choice is to take it knowingly and be its (and your new home’s) silent friend, or to take it unknowingly and be its (and your new home’s) loud slave.

  And ‘slave’ is one of those words in Arachnia that, amidst a flurry of sexual suggestions, strongly connotes the least pleasant aspects of ‘master’.

  But even compared to other spots on Velm, our Sygn retreat here at Morgre was quite modest. Our local Arvin produced no famous mystics, no writers of profound tracts, no multivoiced orators, or even thirty-tongued preachers – and few brooding sermons. But it served as a cultural and social centre for the Morgre area when there was nothing here, beside the Hyte-wr, but a loose association of labour communes and cooperatives, nestled at the foot of the Myaluths. Still, many of the primitive statues in the Arvin’s meditation gardens, rich with wood (pith, really), metal, and local gemstones decorating the basic plastine forms, made up in invention and passion what they lacked in sophistication: the itinerant evelm (and sometimes human) artists, who travelled from retreat to retreat in those days, leaving a sculpture here or a net-tapestry there as offering for their fare and lodging, had a sense – the best of them – of what would widen a local’s eyes. When the retreat was moved three hundred metres south to make way for the sinking of Morgre proper, only two of the meditation gardens were reconstructed on the new site. (The statuary from the other three is now at Dyethshome.) In my own too infrequent visits to the Arvin, where it currently stands, its pale blue walls set with carved portrait faces, licked over with reddish schist-moss, gazing out on to Morgre’s South Plaza Market, I doubt I’ve ever seen more than six people at a time using either one of the remaining gardens for actual inward-communion. But tradition has it that, in the early days, area meetings were held there in which four or five hundred workers2 would come to vote and discuss local and geosector policy and offer replacement ones. Presumably hundreds among them stayed to meditate – though where hundreds might lie down to pray, even in five gardens, always puzzled me, since I could visualize no more than twenty people at a time using the ones they still had.

  The seven levels of Morgre were sunk into the scrumbly stones of the Vyalou in 2,588 Web Standard. Its northern edge just touches the three artificial spurs that had been dug off the Hyte. The Myaluths to the west offer substantial protection from the hotwinds that tear over most of three months through the otherwise balmy climate in this geosector, bringing scalding grit and the stench of acetone all during the season of the pearlbats.

  Hotwinds make the above-ground parks and recreational levels of a number of the larger urban complexes further oest and north pretty much a joke. Five hundred kilometres away in Farkit they put out warning signs half an hour before a blow is expected – and everyone goes underground. Here in Morgre, because of the Myaluths, with goggles and a good sandsuit, humans for an hour and evelmi for three can actually walk around in one, though it’s not fun.

  And in the same year as the sinking of Morgre, on what is occasionally called Dyeth’s Rise, by Whitefalls – one of the three waterfalls the Sygn was able to coax from the underground water springs about here, whose streams join in Morgre’s Central Park, to flow away and finally mingle with the hot oils of the Hyte – at the end of the path of polychrome clays, flanked with topaz cactus, Mother Dyeth, who had just resumed as job1 as a foreman at one of the furniture communes and had taken a job2 as a spiritual adviser at the Arvin, instructed the great off-world ships and cross-country transports that sidled up beside the already bustling cranes and diggers and crawlers and loaders furiously laying in the underground levels of Morgre complex (and the ships and transports all bore the insignia of Vondramach Okk) to erect the astonishing gift she had been presented with, a gift so large its implication may never really have penetrated to the folk with whom she had worked in this area five years before.

  But that’s to get away from Morgre proper and turn to the castle going up – and down – by the waterfall to the east. And though that castle, Dyethshome, is my home, that’s not yet my plan.

  3.

  Just off Fayne-run, centred in Morgre’s fourth layer down, Dylleaf Crescent has got to be the dingiest street in the city. Up between slanted black columns, high ceilings had once displayed elegant frescoes. But during a long forgotten industrial overflow, a union lower down had requisitioned the roof for storage space, bolting up their ribbed and rickety gondolas. Eventually some of them had been removed. Some had simply been emptied, but still hung there. A lot of the frescoes had come down with them, so that blotches of dirty yellow plaster now patched what was left of the grey, green, and gold.

  The street cleaners must have been on the blink again, because facribbons had been trampled into mulch and kicked against the stone walls, too wet and wadded for the air currents to lift and carry towards the waiting grills. (Sometime soon, tracers2 would arrive with their wide blades to scrape them away …) I ducked through a stone gate a head too low for me.

  And I’m not tall.

  But the gate had been put up generations ago when it was just assumed no human would ever live here – though
once, on a labour2 sabbatical, I’d had my living room only metres away.

  In the dusty floor, six limen plates made a hexagon. Overhead, four of the six viewing lights worked, thrusting misty pillars down from the darkness.

  I stepped on to one. ‘Santine,’ I called, ‘are you at home?’ (At home my own viewing light wasn’t working so I couldn’t see who was at my plate.) ‘Santine?’

  ‘Oh, just a second, will you. There …’ and I felt the sensation that is something like rising but more like falling, in a column of light …

  ‘So.’ Santine reared up on her hind fours and dropped her black, scaly head to the side. ‘You’re back from gallivanting about the stars and have decided to pay a world-bound friend a visit.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve been back for three days. But my job2 caught me up immediately out at the home and I’ve just only been able to try any new tastes since this afternoon.’

  ‘Well, come in. Come in, and I’ll find us something interesting to suck on.’

  I stepped off the plate on to the grey and blue clays that stretched off to the hedges of silvagorse and on for desolate kilometres towards the middling cliffs. At the horizon was Morgre, in which I had been only seconds before. The city lay, like a toy of girders and plates, dark and miniature in the west. The sky to its left was still copper.

  Under indigo air, pole lights stood at half-illumination about the semi-tiers of stone into which Santine’s room was hewn. Out of season, five or six pearlbats flicked at the tallest. Outside on Dylleaf there’d been the warm bellow of the street cleaners; here there was natural breeze.

  ‘Sit. Sit.’ With bluish claws she plumped a pile of cushions covered by an antique web-work tapestry she’d brought with her from Hysy’oppi in the north, years before I was born. ‘All safe for you. Sit.’