Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Samuel R. Delany

  The green light bar before the comscreen on my desk was blinking under the tape rumple and through the dice. Some sister or parent or cousin was calling to find out where I’d gotten off to, jovially to demand I return to the ball court and watch the presentation of some elaborate gift, hear the recitation of some florid toast. Beyond the rail, fire cactus tittered. The warm breeze tickled my neck. Among cold stars a single light moved in a trajectory between moons – a satellite catching and throwing back a fragment of my world’s communicative complexities.

  What would the Xlv mean to the Thants of Zetzor, the Dyeths of Velm, to the women, human or other, of (approx.) six thousand two hundred worlds?

  What about the fact: There is an alien life form that may have destroyed someone’s world …?

  What did that mean to the Xlv?

  The call bar blinked green again. I started to press it, but for a moment I looked over the railing about the patch of mine that filled my after-dark horizons; and felt strange – estranged, really, as though considering the demise of one world made me a stranger to this most familiar spot on my own.

  Might the ravines and marshes, the urban complexes and universities and hive-caves of Velm, I wondered, flare suddenly and broil away before a world-wide fire wall …?

  With that smile we prepare so easily for friends, for stream, for anyone we love (and which always feels so odd in the ligaments of the human face; though the evelmi among the Dyeths say they do not know this feeling), I pressed the answer plate. ‘Hey, Clearwater …’ I said to the familiar face forming. ‘Look, would you tell V’vish and Shoshana I’ll be back up in a while? Don’t worry, I haven’t finked out on you yet.’

  At the same time the column of light that was the entrance to my room came on in the platform corner. I glanced at it as George Thant materialized, with that artificially metallized skin, looking very like a polished bronze statue, every one of her movements suggesting pyrite heated to that near-white temperature where the form begins to crumple like hot wax; and Zetzor is so cold.

  She was laughing and rocking. But since she was outside (more properly, inside) the door (more properly, the column) and my viewing light had, finally, been fixed, I could see her; but she couldn’t see me. On the comscreen Clearwater was saying: ‘… and come downstairs, Marq, before George gets there and makes a nuisance of herself.’

  George is probably the strongest person I’ve known from any world, physically speaking, who does not use artificial muscular additors. ‘Marq! Hey, Marq!’ She was flexing her brazen hands as though one or the other of them might be clutching a rock, a neck, an ice shard. ‘Come on and join the party. We want to see you!’

  ‘All right, George,’ I said. ‘I’ll be down in a few minutes!’

  ‘Look, only one of your beautiful sisters is still around. Egri is doing her lizard routine. You’re supposed to be the guy who knows how to make strangers here feel at home. Come on down and be hospitable!’

  ‘George,’ I said, this time loud enough for her to hear, ‘you would be at home in the pit of a volcano or on top of a glacier’ – both of which are structures common on Zetzor and unknown on Velm. ‘Look, hang on to your left tit and I’ll be up when I damned well feel like it, you metallurgist’s reject!’ It fascinates me what makes some people comfortable.

  George roared with laughter and turned in the column unsteadily, like someone a great deal drunker than I suspect she was.

  ‘Now stop cluttering my doorsill, gnat-brain, and leave me alone!’ And we do have gnats here. And I don’t like them. There’s an energy about the Thants, every one of them, that fascinates us Dyeths – almost every one of us. We regard it, watch it, discuss it endlessly. I wonder if it’s analogous to their fascination before our age and tradition. George is also the least sexually exciting human I can think of, which has always struck me as odd since strength and size are usually positive factors in my erotic schema. But in her great body, they just sat together wrong. I suspect the Thants surround for me all that is, or could possibly be, alien. (‘The alien is always constructed of the familiar,’ is as good a translation as any of ‘The Alien’ ’s opening half-line, though it lacks all music.) And I know that’s because any request for a false parity, where Dyeths might play a congruent part in the Thants’ schema, is simply not to be met with. Still, the fascination – much more than the simple desire to use – exists on both sides; probably exists less on their side than on ours, which is the wonder.

  ‘Yes, Clearwater. I won’t let George bother me. I hear you. Thanks for the warning. Thanks a lot …’ as the entrance column went dark in the corner around the retreating bronze. On the comscreen Clearwater’s black face melted, glittering, like all night.

  4

  Rescue on Rhyonon

  Cut through the galaxy’s glitter; slice away all night. What thoughts did I dole out to that world (out of the six thousand, which, according to a rumour that had crept worlds and worlds away, corroborated only by a certain certified psychotic, may have been) destroyed by Xlv?

  Certainly I thought about it.

  Yet after a week, after a handful of weeks, now at home, now away, somehow the rational part of my mind had accorded it much the weight one gives to the most insubstantial notion.

  I was finishing up a fairly simple job1 – though today, none are easy. The folk artists in the temperate wastes of Yinysh – a world whose polar caps are sheeted with black ice – make vast mosaics out of tiny laterally sensitive tiles: changes in light cause them to change not their own colour, but to transmit a colour change to the tile beside them: by fine manoeuvrings, this can be worked into a mosaic whose picture moves and changes with the changing sun. Four thousand seven hundred light-years along the rim, an architect in the equatorial stone fields of Batria – a thin-aired planet where atmosphere is released from volcanic fissures in the north and shipped in orange plastic tanks to the planetary midlands – heard of them. As she was also a religious leader for three geosectors, nothing would do but to import the actual tiles to decorate her new pantheon’s sunrise-facing facade. The expense was undertaken in the name of interworld relations. I was hired for expenses (huge) and a modest fee (modest) to shepherd those cartons of glittering hexagons across five thousand light-years of dark. We had paused on some vasty station orbiting one of Batria’s Lagrange points. I was off ship in a library cubicle looking up information that I thought might come in handy for a job1 that I saw a good chance of picking up once I got down to Batria (What’s my whimsical historical document turns out to be your immoral, tasteless, obscene … Anyway, there’s one reason they need industrial diplomats), when my call number slid up the green tube running past my cubicle, stopped at eye level, and bonged.

  I swung the reader away from my nose and turned. The call, when I thought through my reception code (visualize yellow fading slowly to green, while hearing the first three digits of my home-mail routing number recited in my sister Alyxander’s voice, followed by the sudden stench of burnt plastic) ran round the tube in imperative pink: Report instanter to the Web Official at Level Two (that’s quarter gravity), coordinates 12-17.

  Curious as to what could possibly be questioned this time about my cargo, I hauled myself out of the cubicle and kicked off through the enamel and silver hall (the library was in the freefall level), from time to time giving myself another pull on the wall railing.

  Accelerate in freefall, and you always have the vaguest feeling you’re rising straight up; decelerate, and you have the equally vague feeling you’re falling straight down.

  I fell (straight down) at a lift cable, grabbed it, and lifted (straight up and at right angles to my former down) through the side wall. Moments later, I stepped off with the blobby feeling one gets in quarter-normal, and strode unsteadily forward taking giant steps, over the yellow pebbled flooring and under blue hanging gewgaws, with large-leafed plants waving either side.

  12-17 was a forest of reflecting panels. I stepped among them, worked my way around lay
er after layer; the floor itself became flats of glass over lower flats of mirror. My own reflection reduplicated away from me in myriad directions, heads all turning as I turned, feet all stepping as I stepped. And suddenly I was surrounded by, and confronted with, and interwoven among a woman who looked up at me from her desk and said:

  ‘Marq Dyeth.’ She smiled with the face of a friendly mule. ‘I haven’t see you for years.’

  ‘Japril!’ The new blue, green, and red rays around the sunburst on her shoulder told me she’d moved up some in the Web’s hierarchy since we’d last chatted together behind the protective plastic shields on the flame beaches of Shahng-al-Voyard. ‘Honestly,’ I said, ‘you are not whom I expected to see here.’

  ‘I’m not here, actually.’ She turned in her seat, pushed the desk, which drifted aside on silent rails, and crossed her silver leggings.

  2.

  I sat on the floppy purple thing inflating blobbily behind me. ‘Just how far away are you?’ It firmed beneath me.

  ‘More than nine thousand light-years.’ She toyed with something that was gold and thin, black knobs on both ends. (Pencil? Microphone? Letter opener?)

  ‘That’s a rather costly hyperwave projection just to say hello.’

  ‘We have forty minutes’ conference time, Marq. A few seconds out for nostalgia won’t hurt – though I doubt if it will help either. We’ll let it go at that.’

  I had some good memories of Japril: her insight, her ambition. I also had reason to wonder if some of her memories of me were not so pleasant. ‘I’d thought you’d be somebody calling to chide me about my current cargo. But this has got to be about some past crime of mine, if not some crime to come.’ Spiders all think industrial diplomacy is a crime; they may be right.

  Japril went from smile to grin with those big teeth of hers. ‘Actually, it’s neither.’ Her fingers came together on the golden bar. (Calculator? Energy knife? Water purifier?) ‘Relax. What do you know of Rhyonon?’

  A memory of Clym; and a chill. ‘Only that no one is supposed to know that much about it.’ Funny thing about that chill. It didn’t subside. There’s something permanently scary about an entire world’s death, even in rumour.

  ‘What do you know about the rescue operations? The few thousands we got out, say, or the few colony ships the Web managed to load up in hours and evacuate during the course of the disaster? The survivors we managed to prise out of the peripheral ruins and smoking wreckage once the major conflagration was over?’

  The Web is information; it’s silly to lie to a spider, especially one with that many rays rainbowing her sunburst. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘There weren’t any. At least of those.’

  See what I mean.

  ‘You want to know where I am.’ Japril’s fingers moved absently on the stick. (Sound recorder? Cosmetics case? Musical instrument?) Possibly having something to do with it, possibly not, mirrors blanked out among us; reflections vanished. Behind Japril a wide, indistinct window looked out on a brown landscape, boxed and blotted with architectural oddities, some angular, some freeform, many connected by arching tunnels. The sky was salted with stars. ‘I’m at a rescue station on the sixth moon of Chyvon, in the Tyon-Omega system; Chyvon’s a gas giant one out from Rhyonon. Within an hour of the catastrophe, a rescue station was set up on Rhyonon’s nearest moon and an overflow station here.’

  ‘Then some did get out …?’ hearing, as I said it, how ridiculous it sounded. With two years’ planning, you can lift a few thousand women from one world and relocate them on another. How many can you evacuate within minutes?

  ‘The station on Rhyonon’s moon was closed down to a skeleton staff within a hundred hours after the catastrophe.’

  ‘I would have thought that the majority of the refugees – ’ I felt strange calling the survivors of an entire world refugees – ‘would have been brought to the nearer station.’

  ‘The reason we maintain the skeleton staff on Rhyonon’s moon is at least to suggest – to those who’re suggestible – the possibility of a small refugee population there.’

  ‘But there isn’t one …?’

  ‘As far as illusions go, it’s pretty paltry. Believe me, I wasn’t in favour of it when it was decided on.’

  ‘Japril,’ I said. ‘Are there any survivors at all?’

  She took a long time to say: ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they’re not on Rhyonon’s moon, but rather on that moon of … Chyvon, with you?’

  She took an even longer time to nod – throwing me to all those far-flung cultures where a nod does not necessarily signal affirmation. But they were not Japril’s.

  Nonchalantly as I could manage, I asked: ‘How many?’

  One reason Japril became friends with me in the first place is because of her uncanny ability to see through my diplomatic masks. ‘Why don’t I tell you, instead, your relation to this survivor, Marq?’

  ‘You mean this woman is a factor in my life of an order other than rumour?’

  ‘It’s a notable relation. And don’t discount rumour. It’s the real order of business this evening.’ (Where I was, I was thinking of it this afternoon. But no matter.) ‘I’ve noted that relation – ’

  ‘And the Web wants to exploit it. Which is why you’ve called on me to talk about it – across nine thousand light-years.’ One reason I became friends with Japril is because of how quickly her ambitious and devious plans open all their exfoliations to my view. ‘There is a survivor, isn’t there? At least one.’ Really, I was thinking of Clym far more than the various suggestions Japril had all but thrown in front of me.

  ‘We’ve had Rat Korga here at the station for …’ There was relief in her voice as she said the name to me for the first time; and I got a sense that this was something she had not talked about with many people; and that to talk about it with someone outside a very limited circle was something she had wanted to do for: ‘– well, for a while now.’

  3.

  ‘Let me tell you about Rhyonon, Marq. Sit back and I’ll catalogue the horrors. I’ve done it in enough reports that I can recite it in my sleep. The flame shell,’ Japril said, ‘where it roared across Rhyonon’s surface, was over fifty thousand feet high – which effectively did in any passing air travel. Most of the actual holocaust was confined to the equatorial areas. So was ninety per cent of Rhyonon’s population. The resultant gaseous toxic alone, not to mention the incredible heatstorms that went raging out north and south, pretty well did in the parts of the world that were not directly burned. Winds over the whole planet rose to nearly six hundred kilometres an hour. In ten hours, the major flaming areas had more or less burned themselves out, with twelve per cent of the planetary surface fused and the atmosphere radically deoxygenated. How’s the reception over there where you are, Marq? I just got a flicker. No, don’t say anything. Just let me go on. In seventeen hours, there was an average drop in temperature recorded over the general surface down to a hundred degrees celsius, or even below that, here and there; and the average was falling. Because we have to mark it somewhere, this is now considered the official termination of the catastrophe, though there were still seas of hundred-fifty-degree muck bubbling around, on places that had never seen temperatures above twenty-five degrees celsius before. Choosing the real moment of termination over something the size of a planet is rather like deciding where the edge of an atomic mushroom cloud is with a ten centimetre rule. But less than twenty hours after the disaster’s commencement we were actually flying through that planetary murk. Marta was glum; and Ynn was putting out the forced cheerfulness that only makes the glum get angry. I called myself keeping my mind on the controls; and never have bothered to ask what I looked like to the others in the rescue boat. It only took us half an hour’s flying over thousands on thousands of square kilometres of lava fields, in the midst of which had once been some of Rhyonon’s major civilized cities of millions, to realize it was a pretty useless search. And how many hours was it after that, our scout
ing ships veered north and south towards the poles? How many scouting ships were there? And why was ours, among the hundreds called down to quarter and requarter the assigned areas, the one to make the strike? Suddenly our radar, peeking through the blackened air, came back with the ruin of a building. You have to understand that in places where a day ago there had been urban complexes as big as Vongle or Rimena –’ Japril and I had met in Vongle afloat on Pattuck’s southeastern seas – ‘there were only puddles of boiling mud. Large puddles, too. The deserts in the south had just been scorched – which is to say, that for a few hours a wind somewhat above the temperature of boiling water had raged at several hundred k’s an hour over them, which was enough to do in any but the staunchest surface structures and pretty well all animal life; not to mention plants.

  And there was … a ruin!

  ‘We sat our three-girl boat down beside it. The air was unbreathable – we had to go clomping out through the portal tube in heavy heat suits, because the temperature even here was still in the neighbourhood of sixty degrees. Walking across the sand towards the broken walls, Ynn’s boot toe struck a pile of rubble falling away from something which, as we gathered around it and kicked away more dust, was clearly some desiccated transport machine.

  ‘Within the roofless walls themselves, there was sand almost a foot deep over what turned out to be thermoplastic floorplates. There was also almost a complete lack of information about what function the station had served or who its inhabitants had been.