Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Page 20
‘What did they turn out to be?’
Japril’s left hand danced on what might have been a piece of jewellery, the key to – or the catalogue of – her personal wardrobe, or the next month’s orders for her and the spiders in her nest. ‘They were hard-circuitry replacements, of an astonishingly sophisticated kind given the year they were constructed, to counterfeit the usual operations of the jammed neurons. They feed the results directly back into the nervous system, but with large informative nets added in. The rings get their “information” into the brain by using the sheathing impedance of the whole neural web as its general neural receptor.’
‘Could you use them on Rat?’
‘We wondered about that a lot. Unlike our Korga, Vondramach Okk was not, for all her failings, an informatively deprived sociopath. If anything, she was a hopelessly privileged psychopath – and by almost any account a genius. The two shared few or no deep free-afferent synaptic configurations. The rings, however, were not constructed with the individualized synapse tailoring we use today to hook the neural receivers and transmitters into children to connect them with GI, or to allow them to use mentally activatable equipment. Instead, they bombard the more complex neural webs with blanket information matrices at every free entrance point.’
‘Was the technology available to recreate them for you?’
‘Once we figured out what they were – with the help of the little booklet stashed down in the case – we had a set of them from among those that were the proper size shipped out.’
‘The rings Vondramach wore?’
‘That Vondramach wore some of, some of the time, from among some of those that would fit her. Whether she wore them permanently, or whether some more refined neurological compensation was eventually developed for her is just one of those things about her that isn’t documented.’
‘I gather there were times she could get passionate about privacy. Every once in a while, so the Dyeth tradition has it, she’d destroy quite at random great portions of the records that accumulated about her – ’
‘– and still managed, at least for most of her adult life, to be the most documented human being in the universe.’ Suddenly Japril laughed again. ‘But the thing you can be sure of in this day and age is that no one is the “most” of anything; just the “most” you happen to know about. Marq, we had the rings imported –’
‘This survivor, Korga, is very important to the Web … Who was the ID on the import job, by the bye?’
‘No one you’re related to, or who would be likely to let you pump them about the matter.’
‘Perish the thought!’
Japril let several odd and unsettling expressions flow along her long, handsome face. ‘We’ve already talked of the “fuzziness” about the concept of a world-survivor. But there is a simple second-rate truth that you’ve probably suspected, if not known, all along.’ She settled on one with the corners of her mouth way down. ‘Whether the phenomenon is fuzzy or not, a growing number of people, despite all the Web has tried to do to prevent it, consider Rat Korga the single survivor of a totally depopulated world.’
‘Backtrack a little, Japril.’ I admit it. Vondramach had pricked my curiosity. ‘What sorts of information were in those rings?’
‘Very basic stuff.’ The corners of Japril’s mouth went back up. ‘Remarkably close to a first-order GI series, actually: mathematical tables, general vocabulary accretion lattices, metonymic multipliers, some spatial and temporal prompters, temporary term retainers, and mnemonic nudges – the sort of aids that would make anyone seem brighter, without necessarily influencing their basic opinions about anything.’
‘“Nothing to influence opinion,”’ I quoted an early critic of the GI system, ‘“and everything to alter belief.” Were there any data reverse-retrieval systems?’
‘Quite a lot.’ (Those are the subconscious systems by which you decide whether other people possess a context for understanding what you want to say or not, and, if not, for adding appropriate contextual material to your own communication. Another name for it is – you guessed it – diplomacy.) ‘Data reverse-retrieval seems to have been one of Vondramach’s prime concerns, if one can go by the rings’ contained programs.’
‘I’m not really surprised. So … these are the things that are erased from the normal brain by the synapse-jamming process?’
An even stranger expression took over Japril’s face. ‘These are among the things thought to be able to compensate for some of the jamming effects – back in Vondramach’s era.’ The gold bar, with its two black knobs, suddenly went into a side pocket of Japril’s vest. I actually felt a regretful hitch that now I’d probably never find out what it was. ‘When we were checking out accounts of the synapse-jamming in the first place, we found that a number of people had advanced the theory that the jamming produced, by artificial means, the neurological state achieved naturally by certain saints, mystics, and holy women. Presumably, they would go through alternate intellectual and spiritual disciplines to get there that would perhaps produce slightly different results – at any rate, the saintly bit was the part, of course, that interested Vondramach.’
‘Thanks to her Family connections, I know there were people who considered her a religious leader. But I don’t think anyone would call Vondramach a saint,’ I said, ‘even for three days – or however long she was jammed. After you got the rings, what happened when you revived Korga again?’
‘We emptied our survivor out of the sloping coffin …’ The frown on Japril’s face was suddenly readable distress. ‘Korga stood among the supports, not holding any of them, green eyes wide. Marta walked up, took the wet wrist, and slipped one, another, and then another of the rings on one and another great finger.’ Japril joined her empty hands – which was what she used to do frequently when someone from the north of my world would simply sigh. ‘They fit.
‘It was only a blink. Marta started at it; and the head turned a fraction to see her.
‘Ynn stood among the support loops, holding Korga’s fingers, still wet with our juices, bound now with metal, like something alive … I described those great, rough hands, later, at least five times as “like something alive” before Marta said to me: “But Japril, Korga’s hands are,” and I had to paw over my memories of the waking to find what made me react as though they were not.
“Who are you?” Ynn asked.
‘The lips met, parted, halted.
‘“Rat … Korga,” Ynn said with an inflection that questioned as much as it stated.
‘“Rat Korga …” The repetition, in the deeper balder, flatter voice, somehow reversed the weights of stated and questioning emphases within the single name.
‘“What are you feeling, Rat Korga?” Marta asked from where she stood by aluminium and plastic struts.
‘Korga turned his head to look about our strange machines (Why were most of them enamelled green or yellow?), at our walls (Who decided they should be blue?), out our windows (What was the use of windows in such a moonscape?). Where those alien eyes that we had loaned now looked, we interrogated everything. The eyes turned to Marta’s, to Ynn’s, to mine. “I feel … more fear than I’ve felt for … many years. What do you want? Why have you brought me here?” Korga was a terribly strong male; and the hours of our ministrations had no doubt left her body stronger. But both our native logic and borrowed expertise said that strength should have been awkward in its newness. Korga seemed so easy with that awkwardness.
‘Korga looked at me; and, while I tried to untangle the survivor’s unspoken questions from mine, Ynn, on the stand, said suddenly:
‘“Your world, Rat. It’s gone.”
‘Korga looked down where Ynn pressed those big fingers, heavy with new knowledge.
‘Ynn stepped back, her own hands wet with what had healed.
‘“What … world …” Korga asked in a voice whose hoarse accents already spoke to us of old wounds in that throat we hadn’t even noticed. “My … world …”
‘“Your relatives. They’re all dead.”
‘Rat said, still looking down: “I never had any relatives.”
“Your friends. They’re dead too. All of them.”
‘Rat made the diagonal movement of the head up, that we had learned, in Rhyonon’s second most common language, indicated negation. “I don’t have any friends.”
‘I said: “The people you worked with, the place … it’s gone, Rat Korga. Everything you’ve ever known … your work, all the things you didn’t know that made what you did know what it was. Your world, it’s gone.”
‘That big-boned, red-brown face watched me with a concern lacking all suspicion, with a vulnerability lacking all hostility. Their absences made me realize how used I was to ignoring them in the looks of others.
‘“My world …” Rat repeated. “My work wasn’t much. All that’s gone? Is that all?” Once more Rat looked around the room, at a machine, at a window, at one of us, at a floorlight. “Now I am not as frightened as I was.” The various observation lights, set around the floor, threw up amber illumination to underhook a knee, to catch in the foreskin’s wrinkled cuff, to shadow the curve of a vein along the scrotum and snarl in the hair above and around the genitals, to burnish the flesh below the navel’s cave and light that cave’s roof, to underlight a nipple and the roofs of smaller pits and dermal irregularities about the jaw, to illuminate beneath her brows. I watched and wondered where the hormonal tides and impedance gradients and saline shifts that constitute fear inscribed themselves on that lank body.
‘As Korga watched us, ringed and unringed hands came together. Once, Marq, on a frozen outpost where spines of black rock were strung with vines of a substance we were not sure was really alive or simply crystalline, a small, white, furry, and many-legged creature – definitely alive and insistently friendly – became my companion. She was silent, curious, and affectionate. And I was alone. One day I found her pulling herself between the rocks – she had fallen. One of her legs had broken. I picked her up in my thin gloves and carried her back to the compound, under the grainy sky. I called up three different GI programs on her alien anatomy, ethology, and convalescent patterns, which only confirmed what I knew and put off my doing it another minute. I took out a plasti-splint from the medicabinet, bent it to shape, peeled it apart, grasped my little friend under one arm, and pulled straight her injured limb while ignoring the others’ flailing. I secured the two pieces of the splint on either side of her limb. As the splint grew back around it to form a plastic sleeve-cast, I set her down on the floor and picked up a tranquillizer bulb that, admittedly, I should have administered before I put on the splint. When I turned back to my friend, I was in time to see that she had secured all her working limbs behind the splint’s collar. With one gesture, she slid the splint off her broken leg – and that gesture, I realized, was the signature neither of trust nor distrust, but rather of a completely alternate code for what was mete and un-mete: the splint, which she neither knew, understood, nor even questioned, was simply … un-mete.
‘And Rat Korga, in a gesture that brought back to me the grained sky, the chill rocks, and the ribbed and slanted compound walls on a world I hadn’t thought about for fourteen standard years, with bunched fingers, slid a ring off one finger.
‘The face changed.
‘The heavy features’ disruption brought home my inability to read the expressions on either side of their quiet violence. But because I was human and Rat was human, I assumed the former had been some complacency while the latter some distress.
‘“… all the things I didn’t know that made what I did know what it was,” Korga repeated. “When you said that to me before, I understood it. Now … I can remember the words, but not their meaning.”
‘Rat looked at the removed ring.
‘I think that particular thin bronze circle bore around its inner face the bifurcation circuitry that allowed the stabilization of terms amidst reflexive descriptions.
‘Rat looked at us.
‘“You have taken away my world …” On the great hand were still several more rings that controlled complex hierarchies of metaphorical organization. “You have taken away …” Then, in a gesture all of us later agreed communicated urgency, but within which we could find the telltale radicals neither of speed nor intensity by which urgency usually signals itself – his movement was slow, deliberate, and still urgent – Rat pushed the ring back on. “What have you given me?” Korga asked. “What have you taken away?” Looking around the room, Rat took three steps among the support loops, now resting her bare hand on one, with a touch that told how superfluous that support was. (Ynn turned, watching.) “This … this is not my world. On what … world are we?”
‘“It’s not a world at all,” Marta said. “It’s a moon. Of Chyvon.” Then she frowned, because that pitted face remained unchanged. “Chyvon’s a world about sixty million kilometres from yours, that also circles Tyon-Omega.”
‘“To be sure,” I said, “what we call Tyon-Omega, Rat calls simply the ‘sun’. And ‘moon’? Let’s just say we’re someplace very far away, Rat.”
‘Korga looked at that hand, at the metal bands and their settings, raised those fingers – and began to bite at a nail. While Korga chipped and bit and red stones and green stones between the still-wet knuckles glittered to the chipping, those eyes watched us. Biting, Rat spoke – and must have heard that the speech was unintelligible with the gnawing; so stopped biting and spoke again: “I had a world. But it is as true to say I never had a world. You have given me …” He paused to gnaw again while agate or garnet obscured a word: “… possibility of a world. What world will you give me?” The fingers, bent above opals, went back to the teeth – big, straight, more ivory than white. Still biting, still chipping, now at the thumb, now at the little finger, Rat came to the ramp at the stage’s edge and started down, leaving dark footprints that dried in seconds on the spongy floor. Was that slow gait menacing? Did we read menace into it? Korga wandered – and in that room, less than five by five metres, that gait, broad-hipped and great-shouldered, as upward lights swung round the drying body, was, itself, to me what wandering was.
‘Ynn turned, watching.
‘Marta turned, looking for buttons and pedals that, she must suddenly have realized, Rat was now too far from the emptied tanks for her to use; she turned back. And watched.
‘Did Rat read her intent?
‘The hand dropped. “What world will I have? You know: Whatever you have given me, it does not correct the radical …” Rat paused, tongue struggling with the syllables, missing as many as it caught: “… radical anxiety termination. It only compensates. This is not like before, on the desert. So you see, now you must give me a world. Or I may take ten, thirty, or a hundred. And then what would you do with me?” Rat raised the bare hand now, to gnaw again. Knuckles turning, veined ligaments taking shadow and losing it, Rat watched us above shifting joints, stopped beside another floorlight. The ringed hand, fallen to the thigh now, was so still one bloody facet flung its flare up to my eye, unmoving, for five, six, seven breaths.
‘I moved – and blood slid to green to white to orange.
‘Now that their charge had been gone from them for more than a minute, the tubs and shields and meters behind him on the stage, which had washed and watched Korga, began to autodegrade into their liquid states, flowing along the guiding troughs into the waiting flanges of their red and black hexagonal canisters. And Korga was walking again, towards the high archway to another room with the teaching games, and program-courses, and visualization screens, and educative therapy pads, and mobile environmental simulation units which we’d hoped would teach some comfortable movement among the cultural patterns of any number of worlds Rat had never known.
‘“Now what could Rat mean, ‘give me a world’?” Marta asked, from where she leaned against the freeform aluminium decorations set out from the wall.
“Look,” I said, “Rat’s only had these language skills for –” I glanced at the coloured time scale pulsing along the stage’s edge – “about three minutes now. Don’t expect any real accuracy for another three weeks.”
‘But we had all seen the glittering stones from among those which, once, had weighted a tyrant’s hand.
‘Ynn came down the ramp from the arch; I fell in; Marta followed.
‘Hearing our bootheels click the plastiplex, Rat dropped hand from mouth, glanced back at us. (Rat’s own bare feet were silent.) “What world will you give me?” then turned back to squat, examining an inset floorheater beneath its plastic grill.
‘We spent the next days, Marq, trying to find one in which Rat could, with help, fit – one that could fit Rat. We decided, Marq … finally, on yours.’
‘My world?’ I asked. ‘Dyethshome? Morgre?’ I tried to corner the careening astonishment and it was always just beyond me. ‘I mean, the Fayne-Vyalou? All the other three hundred geosectors on Velm?’
‘And in exchange, we’ve decided to give you Rat’s.’
‘Rhyonon? Japril,’ I said, and what I felt was the sudden pervasive yet almost unrealizable anger you’d better be in touch with if you don’t want to ruin three out of four diplomatic missions, ‘what do you … what do you think you mean by…?’