Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Read online

  Did you see the way she went after that damned rat? I mean I was just up the hallway when she lit into him, man!’ (Rat was what you called someone who’d been to the Institute: man was what you called someone who hadn’t.) ‘With a steel pipe! I thought she was gonna kill him!’

  ‘It’s working for a woman, man. That’s all. I just never was that comfortable working for a damned bitch.’ (Bitch, on that world, was what men called women they were extremely fond of or extremely displeased with when the woman was not there.) ‘It just isn’t right.’

  ‘Well, you know the boss. She’s been under a lot of pressure, right through here. And I’ve worked for worse.’

  ‘I know, I know. Still, it gets me, to see her go after somebody – even a rat – that way.’ Shaking their heads, they went on talking.

  Their lozenges tinkled.

  He took down the work gloves from the rack of gloves along the hangar door’s back and pulled them on. One fraying pressure bandage devilled the bottom of his vision along his right cheek. The other was bound just a little too tight on his left leg. He rolled orange-rimmed drum after orange-rimmed drum to stand beside the lift rail of the thirty-metre sled.

  ‘… as soon as a bitch gets any power, man. And with a damned rat …’

  He walked back for another drum and did not think: They talk of me as though I were invisible. But as he tipped the container to its rim, he saw the woman (besides the woman who was first in charge, she was one of two others – excluding rats – on the station staff) who directed the loading. She stood about two metres from the men, a hank of strings hanging from her fist. Threaded on each were the dozens of tiny cubes about which were glyphed the loading, packing, and shipping orders for the station. She had turned her wire mask around on her head so that the intricate plastic shapes, translucent and opaque, hung by her ears.

  Her naked eyes were green.

  In the lined flesh about them (she was not a young woman, but she must have been handsome once, for she was not above five feet tall), he read an expression he recognized as one that had, from time to time, before all this, fixed his own face. (Since the vestibule console had been dropping its oversized message-cubes into his hands every morning, hieroglyph on one side, a simple picture explaining it on another, and on still others the totally mysterious alphabetics, he had been learning – for they had not changed who he was, and he had said he could learn things – to read.) He could not have spoken what was written in her face now.

  ‘Hey, man,’ someone called to her from the corner of the sled, ‘you better check out your stacking schedule…’

  What he did think was: a damned bitch … a damned rat … He watched her watch him. Slowly she reached up. Strings swung, cubes clisked, plastic clattered as she twisted her mask to place. She breathed out, making no sound and taking a long time doing it. Then, wrapping the hanks of string efficiently around her forearm, she turned to go after three other rats struggling with a distillation unit just inside the hangar door.

  He began to roll his drum.

  In his sixth year there, an important personage came to inspect the station. He noticed, and did not think about, the titters and whispers passed on station rampways and at turns in the halls. (‘I don’t care how tall they look! You better stop talking like that, or somebody just might start wondering about you … !’) The day before, the woman first in charge had suddenly resigned, and he had heard men talking in the corridors, behind purples and greens and blacks and yellows: ‘She told him she was going back south and commit herself to the rat-makers! I mean, can you imagine someone who’s reached her position doing that to themselves? She’s got to be crazy, man. I always told you she was crazy – although you have to respect the bitch.’ And the other woman had left the station a long time ago anyway.

  That night, he turned over on the ground, waking, to see the station’s back door open on a silhouette in yellow light. (Inside the station the halls were always illuminated with yellow tubelights during the hot polar winter.) A body-sheath of gold – possibly a silver that just looked gold in that mustard glow – a tall cylindrical mask, black and set with dozens of reception and projection lenses, black boots with decametre-thick soles …

  He did not know, nor did he wonder, which lenses worked.

  ‘Well …’ The short laugh was mechanically distorted. ‘I just thought I would come out and see for myself.’

  Around him on the ground lay an oval of blue, which came from one of the lenses. At one edge was the foot of the rat sleeping to his left; on his other side was the blued elbow of the rat to his right.

  ‘I always check with the Institute before I embark on one of these expeditions to the outer reaches. Shutting down a station like this, this far away from civilization, is never pleasant. Still, you’d be surprised what you can find in the rat cage if you look. For example, the Institute told me before I came that you – yes, you – and I share complementary predilections that might have resulted in an hour or so of pleasure for us both.’ The mechanical laugh again. ‘I’m afraid, however, I hadn’t counted on –’ The glow around him changed to red; nothing else happened ‘your looking quite like that. Your face … ! Well, I shall simply retire to my rooms. And perhaps cut my stay here short by a day or two. Sorry to have disturbed you. Go back to sleep.’ The figure in the high-soled boots retreated, tottering, behind the door and closed it.

  He lay on his back, curious at the warmth flickering low in his belly, in his thighs, a flickering which, as he recognized in it an almost forgotten arousal, ceased.

  He slept. And woke with a gentle shaking of his shoulder. He blinked in the orange dawn-light. A thick sole rocked him back and forth. Above, the speaker-distorted voice said: ‘All right, up you go. Time to get up.’ The masked figure moved on to kick another rat awake, but gently – which was not the way they kicked him awake other mornings. ‘All right. Everybody up. Well, rats, what do you think of the new job you’re going to, hey?’ The figure stopped to brush sand off the shoulder of one woman porter.

  ‘Think …?’

  The figure laughed. ‘You can think, you know – though they don’t encourage it in places like this.’ In the tight, metallic suit the man moved among shambling rats. The cylindrical mask revolved. Lenses retracted; lenses appeared. Then the figure paused. ‘Didn’t they tell you yesterday that all of you had been sold?’

  One rat said. ‘No. They didn’t tell us.’

  The cylindrical mask revolved again. ‘I hate it when they treat rats that way. It isn’t necessary. They could have told you. I hate it.’ A light behind one lens changed from deep red to green, but under the streaked sky it wasn’t that noticeable. ‘Well you have been sold, the lot of you. Most of you are going north again.’

  It was another underground station with sandstone walls up to the wire mesh below the ceiling. The masked figure was with them.

  He stared at the lensed headmask, unblinking – not feeling any of last night’s lust but remembering it, wondering if it would come again. The creature behind the lenses didn’t seem to notice at all – until the car roared up.

  ‘Okay, inside you go. Inside!’ and the little hand reached way up to give him a friendly push on the shoulder. ‘Sorry, rat …’ Then the door of the transport shut behind him and he was in the dark with the others. (There should have been some lights. But they probably weren’t working.) He nearly fell when the car moved.

  Many hours later, they shot from darkness to pale, blinding blue. With his eyes squinched against the glare, forcing them open, closing them, then forcing them open again, he realized that the curved roof and the upper half of the walls as well as large parts of the floor were transparent.

  Between the rings that, every few seconds, flashed back around the hurtling car, he saw cloud and, way below, rock. Here and there, something flickered as though the stones were afire. Hundreds of metres or hundreds of kilometres ahead a mountain wall drew closer, darkening.

  Red and brown rocks towered about
.

  Moments before the car smashed into the stone-face, he saw the hole with still another ring around it.

  Another rat in the car mumbled: ‘Another world …’

  They plunged into it: darkness.

  He’d known his world contained cities and sand. But the canyon, with its rocks and rampant clouds, made him, though he could not have said how, change his vision of what a world was.

  After the ride there was another station, another shower. The man who ushered the hundreds of rats who’d been collected here into the hangar, under water nozzles along the ceilings and walls, stopped him long enough to say, ‘Jeeze! You look like you ain’t been washed since you got to the Institute!’ (The rat cage in back of the polar station, though it had been disinfected and deodorized once a month, had not had any water for washing rats.) After the shower they were issued more clothes. (The ones he’d been given back at the Institute had, down at the polar station, come apart, bit by bit, first at the places they’d been too tight, then all over, now a sleeve falling off, now a pants leg torn away; for the last year he and the other porters had done their work naked.) He was fed from another trough.

  Under girders and wires and behind round windows that distorted things at their edges, he worked for three weeks at the industrial yard before he associated the frequently repeated name Muct with the unknown hieroglyph above the doors and on the first cubes of all instruction strings and stencilled in yellow over the brown and green enamelled machines. There were seven machines from which he had to clean the soot and soiled lubricant that blackened his hands and stiffened his clothes. Unlike the polar station, here he was fed twice a day, washed every three days, and his work togs changed bi-weekly. Around him, thousands of rats serviced the great city full of machines, called Muct.

  The man in charge, of him and some thirty-two others, told him many things, now about one machine, now about another, told him the things softly, simply, clearly – told him to remember them; and what he was told to do, he did. In six months, he had learned how to drive two of the machines and how to repair four others so well that frequently he did not see the man who was in charge for three and four days at a time.

  Sometimes the man came in to where he was working, with another man who himself was being trained to be a rat trainer: ‘Now who says they can’t learn? Look at this one here, for instance. You just got to know how to teach ’em, is all. They learn better than an ordinary man. I mean, you tell them to do something, they do it. And they remember it – if you tell ’em to remember. You just got to know what to tell. I always say to you new guys, you tell a rat to take a shit, you gotta remember to tell ’er to pull her pants down first and then pull ’em up afterwards. Or you gonna have a rat with shitty pants.’ (Most of the rats back at the polar station and most of the rats at Muct were women.) ‘But some guys don’t have the patience. You gotta be patient with a rat. Man, I can get these damned rats to do anything a damned man can do. I can even get them to do things you wouldn’t think a damned bitch could do. Once I taught a rat to cook food for me, just as good as a man.’

  ‘Oh, I know women who can cook!’

  ‘Well, yeah. But those were exceptions,’ the trainer said. ‘And I mean, a damned rat …?’

  ‘What else did you teach her?’ The interlocutor’s lozenges tinkled.

  The man in charge, who didn’t wear a mask (like a rat himself), just grinned as they went out.

  Sometimes between work shifts the man would sneak several rats into his own quarters and tell them to do odd things. Several times other trainers came and kidded him about it or, occasionally, yelled at him about it. Sometimes he kidded or yelled back. But he didn’t stop. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘they all do it too. Even some of the bitches. It ain’t nothing. It goes along with keeping you rats in line. I mean, what’s a damned rat for, anyway? I ain’t never heard one of you complain about it – hey, rat?’ And he wasn’t one of the rats the man took off with him, anyway.

  He had a sleeping pad again. During those hours of the afternoon or night when his shift was not working, he sat on a long bench, watching a high screen, on which were projected stories about men and women who wore the dangling masks. Somewhere before the end of each story one man or another would rip a woman’s mask off and the woman would turn her face away and cry. If the wrong man did it, the right man would kill him – or sometimes kill the woman.

  A month after he got there, they fixed the sound on the projector; after that the stories made more sense.

  He worked and watched stories for three years; then one morning the man in charge came to kick him awake.

  He pushed himself up to his elbow.

  ‘They sold you!’ The man kicked him again, about as hard as he’d ever been kicked, so that he fell back down and had to push up again. ‘How you like that! They sold you out from under me! I’ve really worked on you, too, you mindless rat! You don’t treat a damned man like that. You don’t treat a rat like that, either!’

  He thought the man was going to kick him again. But he didn’t.

  ‘They said they needed some rats with some kind of experience down in the south. You didn’t have no damned experience when you came here. You didn’t know a thing. Now you got some you can use to do something useful, and they’re gonna take you off, who knows where, and use you for who knows what! It ain’t fair, not after all the words I shoved into your dirty ears! It ain’t fair!’

  The man went away. But that evening, after work, he came back. ‘Come with me, now.’

  So he got up off his pad and went.

  The man’s quarters were not large. The other male rat and the five females they had picked up on the way almost filled the cluttered cubicle.

  ‘Okay, okay, get your clothes off. Get ’em off, now.’ The man was tall (almost as tall as he was), and he put an arm around his shoulder. ‘This is going to be a going-away party for our friend here. He’s been sold south, you see. He’s going away tomorrow – and it’s a damned shame, too. It ain’t fair. So come on! Get your clothes off, now. Put ’em over there. There’re some masks. Put ‘em on – no, on your head, shit-for-brains! Come on, you been here before. You remember now, for next time. Put on the masks; then you can feel like real people for a while.’ He scratched his ear. ‘I don’t think it does a damned rat no harm to feel like a real bitch – excuse me –’ (to a rat who’d dropped her splotched tunic to adjust a wire headframe from which more than half the plastic pieces were missing) ‘– or a man. Myself, I think it makes ’em work better. And it don’t hurt ’em much, don’t care what they say …’

  That night he was told to do some odd things. (‘I want you to do just like you’d ’a’ done at this kind of party before you come to the Institute. Exactly like it, you understand? You can use that one, or that one, or that. Only not her – she’s my favourite, right through here, you see? Unless of course she’s got something you really like a lot.’) The man in charge never did put on a mask himself. For much of the evening he made love to one of the masked women while the other masked male struck him on the shoulders and buttocks with a piece of frayed copper wire and called him ‘a tiny rat’ and other things.

  There wasn’t much he’d have done at this kind of party except sit, watch, and bite at his cuticles and nails. (As a boy he’d been to a couple like it.) So that’s what he did. After half an hour, the man in charge, who had spatters of blood all over his shoulder blades by now, looked up and noticed. ‘Okay, then,’ he said. ‘I want you to play with yourself until you come. You too –’ which was to a female rat.

  So he did.

  It felt astonishing and surprising and pleasant – the most powerful thing that had happened to him since the moment he’d said, ‘Yes,’ at Radical Anxiety Termination. When the man in charge sent him outside to go back to his sleeping pad, the female rat had not finished.

  The next day some women in plain beige face-covers got him and took him to another station where he was put on another car. Days later he got
out at a station with sandstone walls, wire mesh on the ceiling.

  Among the men who came to pick up the six rats who’d been delivered, he recognized one: and after a few minutes, while he was checking them for hernias and bad teeth, the man recognized him. ‘Hey, this one was here six years ago!’ he said to his companion. ‘A real idiot! He couldn’t do nothing right! I think they sent us the wrong rat! The order was for rats with some experience of what we were doing up here. But I didn’t mean just any rat who’d been here before and couldn’t do anything!’

  ‘What’re you gonna do? Send him back?’

  ‘Naw. We can use him for porter work. That’s what they used him for before.’

  He worked at the polar station, which had been reopened, doing pretty much what he’d done – carrying the bag back and forth to the data station – for seven years more. Lots of things were different, at least at first. There was another man in charge. Though he didn’t know exactly what, the station was now studying something other than q-plague. Now there were several large, spidery instruments that sat out in the sand with great arms yearning towards the orange sky. And the wall behind the rat cage had been painted blue.

  For a while the rats at the station were given clean clothes each month or so. But they missed the laundry more and more frequently. One morning, when their clothes hadn’t been changed for three months, a man came out to the cage. ‘Okay, come on. Take ’em off. We’re going to go back to the old way. Naked’s better than walking around in that stuff.’ Feeding went back to once a day after that, too.

  * * *

  Coming back across the sand, by the power pylons, he saw the green transport sled and walked by its high, sand-scarred flanks into the station vestibule to lift up the lizard-embossed flap of his canvas bag and empty the elliptical spools of data tape into the receiving slot. About an hour later, someone called him and three female rats into the office of the man in charge.