Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Samuel R. Delany

  STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND

  Samuel R. Delany

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Writer’s Note

  PROLOGUE: A World Apart

  MONOLOGUES: Visible and Invisible Persons Distributed in Space

  Chapter 1. From Nepiy to Free-Kantor

  Chapter 2. The Flower and the Web

  Chapter 3. Visitors on Velm

  Chapter 4. Rescue on Rhyonon

  Chapter 5. Rescue Continued

  Chapter 6. Rescue Concluded

  Chapter 7. Home and a Stranger

  Chapter 8. Strangers and Visitors

  Chapter 9. From Breakfast to Morning

  Chapter 10. A Dragon Hunt

  Chapter 11. A Tale of Two Suppers

  Chapter 12. Return to Dyethshome

  Chapter 13. Formalities

  EPILOGUE: Morning

  Website

  Also By Samuel R Delany

  Dedication

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  Writer’s Note

  Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand is the first novel in an SF diptych. The second novel in the diptych is The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities.

  – Samuel R. Delany

  PROLOGUE

  A World Apart

  ‘Of course,’ they told him in all honesty, ‘you will be a slave.’

  His big-pored forehead wrinkled, his heavy lips opened (the flesh around his green, green eyes stayed exactly the same), the ideogram of incomprehension among whose radicals you could read ignorance’s determinant past, information’s present impossibility, speculation’s denied future.

  ‘But you will be happy,’ the man in the wire-filament mask went on from the well in the circle desk. ‘Certainly you will be happier than you are.’ The features moved behind pink and green plastic lozenges a-shake on shaking wires. ‘I mean, look at you, boy. You’re ugly as mud and tall enough to scare children in the street. The prenatal brain damage, small as it is, we still can’t correct. You’ve been in trouble of one sort or another for as long as there are records on you: orphanages, foster homes, youth rehabilitation camps, adult detention units – and you haven’t gotten along in any of them. Sexually …?’ Lozenge tinkled against lozenge: the man’s head shook. ‘In this part of the world your preferences in that area can’t have done you any good. You’re a burden to yourself, to your city, to your geosector.’ Lozenges lowered, just a bit: the man moved forward in his seat. ‘But we can change all that.’

  He pushed back in the sling that was uncomfortable and costly. A blank and intricate absence on his face, he raised one big-knuckled hand to point with a finger thick as a broom-handle – for the technology of that world still made lathes, lasers, bombs, and brooms: the nail was gnawed almost off it, as were the nails on his other fingers and thumbs. Crowding his wide palms’ edge, whether flailing before him or loose in his lap, those fingers seemed not only too rough and too heavy for any gentle gesture, but also – though, if you counted, there were only ten – too many. The finger (not the fore- but the middle) jabbed brutally, futilely. ‘You can change me?’ The voice in his nineteen-year-old throat was harsh as some fifty-year-old derelict’s. ‘You can make me like you? Go on! Make me so I can understand things and numbers and reading and stuff!’ As brutally, the fingers came back against the horse-boned jaw: a mutated herpes virus, along with some sex-linked genetic anomaly, had, until three years ago when the proper phage was developed, rendered the ordinary adolescent acne of the urban males in that world’s lower latitudes a red, pitted disaster. ‘All right, change me! Make me like you!’

  Either side of a plastic diamond, the mouth’s corners rose. ‘We could.’ The plastic swung with breath. ‘But if we did, then you wouldn’t really be you any more, now would you?’ From the black ceiling, through the orrery of masking bits, a hanging lamp dappled the man’s naked arms. ‘We’re going to make a change in your mind – a change in your brain – a very small change, a change much smaller than the one you just asked for. We’re going to take that little knot of anger you just waved at me on the end of your finger, that anger you just threw back at your own face – we’re going to take that knot, and we’re going to untie it. Maybe thirty brain cells will die by the time we’re finished. Maybe six thousand synapses will be shorted open and left that way. Maybe another thousand will be permanently closed. The illegal drugs we know you’ve put in your belly and your lungs and your veins over the past twelve months, not to mention the past twelve years, have already wreaked more biological havoc among your basic ten billion than we will, by a factor of several hundred thousand. Indeed, a side effect of what we intend to do is that you simply won’t want any more drugs. You’ll be happy with who you are and with the tasks the world sets you. And you must admit that, as worlds go, this is a pretty beneficent one.’

  He didn’t know what ‘beneficent’ meant. And though he’d heard that there were other worlds, other cities (other than the three in whose slums and institutions he’d grown up), other counties, other geosectors, even other worlds with beings who were just not human, it all struck him as only dubiously credible.

  Behind the mask with its plastic shapes a-bob, the man was saying: ‘It’s a decision many men, not to say women, make … Indeed, I read a report last week that said almost three times as many women as men on our world make this decision, though it doesn’t seem my experience. The men – and women – who’ve made the decision we’re asking of you include some fine folks, too: artists, scientists, politicians, well-respected philosophical thinkers. Some very rich and powerful people have decided to abandon their worldly acquisitions and come to the Institute here. They feel, I suppose, we have something to teach them. And though we certainly would never claim such a thing - our method is much too simple – perhaps we do.’

  ‘I can learn things,’ he suggested hoarsely, pulling back in the sling and looking down; for the tests he’d been given over the years suggested stro
ngly that he couldn’t. And the few times he’d hung around the places that were a confusion of books and tapes and films, they’d asked him to leave, or put him out, saying much what this masked man was saying now and saying it much more angrily. ‘I could learn if you taught me …’

  ‘You’ve learned to beg. You’ve learned to steal. And I gather in the last year or two you’ve learned that, for you, begging is better than stealing because you haven’t learned to steal well enough to keep from getting caught. That stands you in good stead here.’ The mouth’s corners rose again.

  Deciding it must be a smile, he tried a small smile back – an expression he seldom let hold his long, rough face for any time.

  ‘As I said, we’re not out to change the fact of who you are. We only want to change that small bit of you grossly unhappy with that fact. All right. Do you choose happiness? You have only to say “yes.”’

  He said: ‘Will it –?’

  ‘Destroy your will? Oh, we don’t do anything so simple or unsubtle. If you can make fine, fast, and fertile decisions now, you’ll be able to make them afterwards. You simply won’t be inclined to make new kinds of decisions, at least without instructions.’

  He said: Will it hurt …?’

  ‘Say “yes.” There’s no pain, I assure you – either physical or emotional. After all, what did you come here for?’

  He said: ‘Well, yeah. Sure. That’s why I –’

  ‘Say “yes.” We need a voiceprint of the actual word; this is being recorded. Otherwise it isn’t legal.’

  Which confused him. ‘“Yes …”? Yeah, but that’s what I –’ and felt something terrible in him pull away or something gigantic in him vanquished; and its departure or defeat was a relief or a release, which, because he had never felt anything before to such an extent, seemed more something that hadn’t, rather than something that had, happened: not an overwhelming occurrence to him so much as a total surround revealed – or removed. He asked, because the question had been struggling with the back of his tongue and came out through momentum rather than desire: ‘When you gonna do it?’

  ‘We just did.’ (He really didn’t want to know …) ‘You, of course –’ The man laughed – ‘expected lightning to whip down from electrodes in the ceiling and crackle about your beleaguered skull – really, we must do something with that ringworm! I mean, on a young man your age? Actually, we use midrange gamma-ray lasers … but you wouldn’t understand. Put your thumbprint here.’ From beneath the desk the man took out a yellow cube, extended it.

  He reached forward to press the great sausage of his thumb on the transparent face.

  ‘There. That gives the RAT Institute licence to sell you to a labour project that, in our estimation, will be both profitable and humane. Let’s see …’ The man’s other hand came up to scatter more cubes, clicking, across the desk. Lozenges dipped to study the inscribed marks: turquoise, orange, lavender. ‘You had a vasectomy in the orphanage back when you were –’ he turned one to another face – ‘thirteen … apparently a reversible one, should you or anyone else want to bother. Well, though you’re not likely to initiate anything in that department now, it’s astonishing how many people still try to use slaves for sex. And we haven’t done anything that’ll stop you from responding – if your accustomed stimuli are applied. But that’s no longer our concern.’ Lozenges lifted. Those over the eyes (purple left and green right) were transparent enough to see through to blinking lids. ‘You’re as happy now as you can be, aren’t you?’ (The silence welling in him obliterated any need to deny; and, anyway, he had never been much for denying what was told him with sufficient authority.) ‘But I don’t have to say that to you. You know it. If you’ll just go through there …?’

  He stood.

  On the arched door were the three hieroglyphs: Radical Anxiety Termination. In his search for the Institute, he had finally come to recognize them, though he still could not really read them, if only because – as a number of people had explained, patiently or impatiently, while he’d been searching – he could pronounce none of the three correctly, even after they’d been repeated to him many, many times.

  He did not think this as he pushed through the flap, where, after waiting nine hours, he was given a shower with some fifteen or twenty others in a hall set up to wash hundreds.

  Three hours later he was given a shirt too loose over his shoulders and pants too tight under his crotch, both of them as usual ridiculously short for his long, long legs and arms – he was just shy of seven-feet-four; and though on that world six-foot-eight, or six-foot-ten was not unusual for a man or a woman, still all of that world’s beautiful people (and the vast majority of its famous ones) were under five-foot-five.

  An hour after that, in a narrow room, he ate a meal standing elbow to elbow with a number of others it did not occur to him to count at a chest-high trough – on him, to his ribs’ bottom. They ladled up metal cups of lukewarm broth, drank, then ladled up more, drank those, ladled up still more. Some wiped where the broth ran down their chins with the backs of their sleeves. He didn’t – because they hadn’t changed who he was, and he certainly wouldn’t have otherwise.

  For five hours he slept in a blue dormitory with green plastic sleeping pads fixed permanently to the floor: in better condition than those at the detention house he’d been in three months ago, which was the last time he’d slept indoors. There the edges had been split, the stuffing soiled and lumpy. He looked at these, remembered the others, and was aware of no contrast.

  For three days he was transported in a freight car through underground tunnels, during which time he was not fed at all – an oversight, apparently, from the resigned humour of the supervisor at the other end who discovered it: ‘Look, if you don’t feed the rats, they ain’t gonna scurry.’

  ‘It was an accident, man! Besides, I hear you can let ’em go thirty, forty days without food and they’ll still –’

  ‘Just do your job and feed ’em?’

  For six years he laboured among the dozen porters at a polar desert research station where, at the printed orders of the computer console in the research station vestibule, he carried small machines strapped on his side to an information relay outpost fourteen kilometres away; and carried papers and tapes back to the research station in a dark yellow canvas bag with a dim picture of a lizard in brown and gold above the self-sealing flap.

  At the orders of the men and women who worked there, he dollied medium-sized machines up and down from the station’s underground refrigeration crypts, where his bare feet left wet prints on the frosted metal walks, where the thrum of some machine down one of the storage corridors made a purple tubelight near the double doors flicker every time the mechanical hum suddenly speeded or slowed, and where the hanks of cable looping under the studded ceiling plates were knobbed along their length with glimmering transparent lumps called ‘ice’ – which had something to do with water, though he didn’t know what.

  Once he was told to make a special trip at four-thirty in the morning out to the relay station to pick up some readings, only the man who told him was new and pointed in the wrong direction. He knew it wasn’t right, but he thought that’s where they wanted him to go anyway. So he walked for six hours while the sky went from starless black to cloudy red in flaming streaks above the sand, brightening to orange and becoming hotter.

  And hotter.

  And hotter …

  They found him, sitting, his feet moving a little, one, then the other, as if still trying to walk, his eyelids swollen closed, his lips dusted grey, cracked here and there, the blood in the cracks dried to black, and the black dusted grey again, his huge hand over the embossed lizard, protecting it from the sun.

  They had come after the bag, of course. It had a signal-locator built in that let them find it anywhere, and it might have had some things in they needed. No one had known for sure what it contained when they’d discovered it was gone that morning.

  They took him back too.

 
; He lay on an old piece of canvas in the sunscreened rear of the transport with a wet rag in his mouth. One or the other of them took it out every few minutes and rewet it so that he could suck it.

  No one ever asked him why he’d gone the wrong way – though he could have told them. After that they just said he was very stupid.

  Even for a rat.

  One night during his third year there, three of the porters sleeping on the sand beside him began to shiver, vomit, and make strangling noises. After four hours, while he lay awake watching, first two, a few minutes apart, then half an hour later the third, died.

  The next morning the woman first in charge of the station beat him with a steel pipe:

  ‘You brainless, moronic, worthless …! Why didn’t you come in and wake somebody up! You idiotic – !’

  The man second in charge pulled her away by her loose, sleeveless shirt. ‘Come on, now! Cut it out!’ (Whatever had been done to him six years ago, though it had stopped any necessity to respond to pain with expressions either of fear or defiance, did not make pain hurt any the less.) ‘They only do what you tell them. Nobody’s ever told this one anything about q-plague.’

  ‘Then what does he think the rest of us are all up here studying it for!… I know: he doesn’t think!’ Before her, plastic careened and swerved and rattled. ‘But seventy-six SI-units apiece those three cost me! And they actually had some skills.’ (By now he knew he’d only cost twenty-eight.) ‘Why couldn’t he have gotten infected! He’s been here longer than the rest. You’d think –’ Then, not thinking, she struck him again, on the knee, so that he finally fell to the mottled thermoplast flooring, one hand over his bleeding ear, the other feeling around his agonized patella.

  ‘Come on, now! Just leave him a –’

  ‘What I want to know is how the virus got out into the rat cage anyway. I mean nobody was supposed to –’ Then she turned, flung the pipe away – it rolled to clank the baseboard – and stalked off. The man second in charge put him back to work an hour later, where he heard three of the other men talking outside behind the station: