Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘Do I? To me, it was all a bit horrifying. There was a solidness, a dullness, an unresponsiveness that lay out on the ceramic flesh, still glazed with our oils, like an underfinish keeping the surface glaze from exploding. Though I knew I was watching a human, I kept trying to decide what genus, what species – ’

  ‘Japril,’ I said, laughing, ‘I know some Sygn priests who’d call you a blasphemer.’

  ‘When a world is destroyed – a whole world, Marq – there are so many fuzzy-edged phenomena that to speak of the event at all is to broach blasphemy. I watched, Marq. And what I sensed, Marta saw. She said something to Ynn, who glanced at me, then looked back. What can be talked of clearly, General Info can teach you in under three-tenths of a second.’ (That’s the time for neural firing throughout a cubic-third-of-a-centimetre of brain material, case you’re interested – the amount of time required to memorize with GI, say, the Oneirokritika by heart.) ‘The rest one must mumble about, either loudly or quietly as is one’s temperament. Marta began to make quiet mumbles – as do most spiders from any of ten worlds I can mention in her home Web-sector – punctuated with the likes of “… severe disorientation … sociopathology … no clearly damaged …” while Ynn said in her high, sharp voice:

  ‘“Well, of course, Japril, after all the trauma suffered, there have to be, almost predictably, some unpredictable results. We found that slight brain damage, supposedly compensated for. But that isn’t normal neural material for a normal neural reaction to waking with no world on a strange moon. Our charge’s world has been destroyed. None of us knows that world by anything but report. The truth is, in subjective terms, we don’t know how strange this place is. We may be dealing with neurological or psychological upset, any combination of the two, and at any level of resolution.”

  ‘And Marta shook her head, whispering: “… remapping of neuronal deployment …”

  ‘After several hand signals, indicating hope and despair in her own religion, Ynn depressed a small pedal:

  ‘… and the survivor’s eyes closed.

  ‘The knees bent.

  ‘The metal floor tipped back to topple the figure into the tub, while the drains reversed to become gargling tributaries. As the body bobbed about, we went through a dozen access catalogues, had a dozen GI programs erased from our minds, and took on some thirty more between us. And we remapped the survivor.’

  2.

  ‘For the next three days we remapped.

  ‘We viewed through diverse screens and measured with sundry meters each neuronal centre and margin, plumbed and monitored and analyzed the chemical context in which each synapse drowned; our computers recorded the ionic dance along a billion nerve sheaths. Our simulators produced conglomerate vector templates in four dimensions and thirteen colours at half-a-dozen different depths of focus.

  ‘But it was only what GI so quaintly calls a “footnote” to an auxiliary program Marta had added almost as an afterthought that finally guided us to the answer: “Something very odd has been done, Japril – probably done a long time ago, too. What’s more, if it is the synapse-jamming the footnote says it is, on most worlds it’s illegal!” We gazed, regazed, reprobed, and reread among the synaptic net-patterns’ possibilities of meaning. (They unpack, like any text, not always with what has been packed into them.) Then we turned to the Web’s Basic Galactic Information map of data-deployment to see if we could locate the proper data-node that would explain the particular biotechnic operation all our researches seemed to indicate.

  ‘The particular method for taking the living brain and doing the kind of synapse-jamming that had apparently been done – perhaps some twenty standard years ago – to Korga the Porter, Rat, was first invented on a world in the seventy-eighth cluster some four centuries ago, and then again, in the forty-third and forty-eighth clusters simultaneously and independently (as far as we can tell) about two hundred and eighty years back – just prior to the time of Vondramach Okk, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Should I say something?’

  ‘It’s relevant,’ said Japril. ‘You’ll see why in a moment. The information had spread slowly from its first source, hindered by law and the civil outrage that can accompany any human discovery women find destructive; it had spread quickly from the latter two sources, camouflaged by a far more liberal attitude towards research when not simply hidden in the information glut that has been the hallmark of more recent times – the glut that is the reason, purpose, and responsibility of the Web. The three data-flows converged on the worlds of the fortieth sector some fifty years ago.

  ‘Such data convergences on the worlds of a single star system from so many directions frequently make an information-stable node that is very hard to control. If the information is highly destructive, frequently when the Web thinks it is under control, it simply pops up under another name in the same place – or right next door. The particular synapse-jamming procedure that we had on our hands in Korga, once we recognized it and traced its diachronic trajectory through the fortieth cluster’s general épistèmé, had proved particularly tenacious. And because Rhyonon was a world out of the main data channels that are central to the Web, not much energy had been expended on it. The synapse-jamming technique first surfaced on a moon of Rhyonon’s cousin world, Jesper, here in the Tyon-Omega system, as a medical method for dealing with certain social intractables. It was squelched by the Web as inhumane and was finally superseded, on that moon, by a programme of drug therapy that was easier, cheaper, more efficient for its purposes, and – for that particular moon – ecologically sounder.

  ‘It re-emerged on Rhyonon itself as a rite in a political movement that had begun gaining wide adherence several hundred years ago. Then there was a political shift – from Yellow to Grey, which may or may not have had something to do with the early conflicts between the Sygn and the Family – and immediately it resurfaced as part of the practice of an extremely violent art form: for some twenty-five years during Rhyonon’s second century many of the artists in various geosectors of Rhyonon’s southern hemisphere, when the emotional stringencies of their craft became too great, would voluntarily subject themselves to this form of mental suicide – during which time the practice gained great social prestige.

  ‘The Web launches, as you probably know, a very different kind of campaign against an aesthetic institution from the sort it launches against a medical one – some say the former is no campaign at all. We try to contour an alternative aesthetic stream away from conceptualization and towards representation. Periods of high-resolution representative art, in whatever field, seem to be local phenomena on any world at all. They never last. But the swing, when we tried it on Rhyonon, was enough, according to our records, to make us think we’d won.

  ‘Again, you must remember that Rhyonon was, as are most of the worlds in the fortieth sector, a terribly unimportant world in the Web’s scheme of things. It was uncommitted in a conflict that had already taken over nine per cent of the six thousand two hundred worlds. It had no General Info system, and its approach to offworld information in general was unsympathetic to say the least.

  ‘The synapse-jamming technique came back once more, this time as a gesture of public philanthropy. The destitute of Rhyonon’s most impoverished social classes, about thirty standard years back, had apparently been allowed – by intergeosector law – government-subsidized access to this most sophisticated technique of “Radical Anxiety Termination”, as the Institute administering it was known.’

  I nodded. ‘If museums are open to the public, then we must make available as well all the strategies the artist uses to contour the particular problems of her life. I’ve encountered the syndrome before.’

  ‘It’s not a privileged one,’ Japril said, which I just assumed was her spidery way of telling me that, in her presumably multilensed eye, some industrial diplomat’s odd datum was not privileged either. ‘So now we had a good statistical context within which to read the signs we had been presented with. Given what we now
knew of Rhyonon, her language deployment, and Korga’s accent, we had established a good statistical probability that our survivor, though found at the pole, was from the sociopathic dregs of one of Rhyonon’s equatorial slums. At some time in the past Korga had apparently been offered, by a benevolent society, a chance at what had been up till recently, on his world, the ave atque vale of artists and priests: the chance to have the paths in the brain though which worry forces us to grow closed over for ever and detours about those troublesome crossroads left permanently open.’

  I raised my chin, which is a sign to continue in the language spoken in the west of Japril’s home world (I wondered if she remembered telling me) and, in many languages of many others, communicates negation and/or doubt.

  She said: ‘The rest of the statistical range – much smaller – includes the possibilities of artist, religious thinker, philosopher, or even an industrial entrepreneur who, after having amassed a fortune but never having bothered to correct her accent (such corrections were apparently done in urban equatorial Rhyonon), suddenly opted for the Termination treatment.’

  I frowned. ‘Radical Anxiety Termination … Does that have anything to do with his name, Rat …? An acronym of some sort?’

  ‘“The Universe is overdetermined,”’ Japril quoted. ‘About seventy-five years ago on Rhyonon, an ideographic writing system was instituted worldwide, in an attempt to clear up the confusion of some five alphabetic systems and syllabaries that had come with the various colonial groups. Since then, all official business had been conducted in ideographics. But such slang and many old terms are best explained by one of the older scripts. The second most common language of Rhyonon as well as its seventy-five-years-now discarded alphabet are closely related to the interlingua you grew up with – though I doubt whether Rat Korga would understand the explanation.’

  ‘I’m not truly sure I do either. Go on, Japril.’

  ‘When doctors think they’ve eradicated a disease, they stop looking for it. So if the disease itself suddenly shows up again, they may not even recognize it; they may even mistake it for an entirely new one. We were lucky to have diagnosed the synapse-jamming for what it was as quickly as we did – since on Rhyonon it was not even considered pathological. But the location of the proper antidote, in such cases, can be even more difficult than diagnosis.’

  ‘Why does the Web consider the situation pathological, Japril?’

  ‘You must remember –’ Japril was smiling again – ‘Rhyonon had no General Information system. It’s precisely those “anxiety” channels which Radical Anxiety Termination blocks that GI uses both to process into the brain the supportive contextual information in the preconscious that allows you to make a conscious call for anything more complex than names, dates, verbatim texts, and multiplication tables; and it also uses them to erase an information program in such a way that you can still remember the parts of it you’ve actually used consciously.’

  ‘What you’re saying is that Rat Korga can never get all those little neurological transmitters wired into the crevices of the top five vertebrae that will hook into whatever local GI system happens to be around.’ I frowned. ‘Coming from a completely destroyed culture into something as complex as the Web, not to mention other worlds, and without the help of GI – that could be hard.’

  ‘Even harder when you consider that Korga began with what you and I would call a hopelessly impoverished information battery. The thing anyone dealing with Rat Korga must remember – and “Rat” you understand is … was a kind of title, and, on Rat’s own world, a pejorative title at that – is that this woman was a hugely informatively deprived individual from a generally informatively deprived world. That much was clear however we mapped the synaptic deployment. As Korga bobbed quietly in healthful juices and restorative fluids, we came to watch at, and lean against, and look through, with our palms up beside our cheeks, the slanted viewing windows – their lower sashes sloughed with froth and squamous scum.

  ‘We had discovered the problem in three days – No, just let me go on. I don’t even want to tell you how long it took to discover the answer.’

  I dared: ‘What was it?’

  ‘Ynn found it – and by an accident that, as I remember now, seems no more probable than the one by which we discovered Korga himself. You and Ynn share an enthusiasm, Marq.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘I mean the period some two-hundred-odd standard years ago at the height of the Family’s power and the reign of Vondramach Okk over the seventeen worlds.’

  ‘I wouldn’t exactly call it enthusiasm,’ I said. ‘There are some traditions among the Dyeths, yes, about the time when all that was going on. And I like her poems. But for me personally, the period’s hardly something I could even call an interest,’ which is not quite accurate either. There is Dyethshome.

  ‘Well,’ Japril said, ‘back when you and I were more friendly than of late, you mentioned it to me enough times so that when Ynn came up with this I thought of you.’

  ‘What exactly was it?’

  ‘For Ynn, this period is an enthusiasm, a passion, an obsession – as, indeed, is everything connected with the life of Vondramach. Relaxing one evening in her living room, it occurred to her to run an exhaustive GI crosscheck between all the information currently at hand on Rat and all the documentation on her personal hobby, Vondramach. All she was looking for, she told us later, was metaphorical similarities that might provide an amusing hour’s musings. She sat down on her hammock, thought over the access numbers, replayed the code, lay back, and let GI do its work. Then – there it was in her mind: the access numbers to a loosely documented historical program on Okk’s youth that she had never run before. Even for an expert, of course, there’d be thousands of those – ’

  ‘Japril,’ I said, ‘I’ve spent all my life on worlds with extensive GI systems.’

  She suddenly shook her head. ‘Really – you must forgive me. I’m beginning to wonder if I haven’t been closeted with Korga just a little too long. One gets into the habit with Rat of explaining everything. Anyway, there it was, beeping like mad and demanding a referential check. Later Ynn said she had been familiar with a number of loosely documented accounts of Vondramach’s youth referring to the early experiments with mind-distorting and dilating drugs, neural-tampering machines, and medical-based consciousness-bending techniques. What she hadn’t known was that before the age of twenty-three Okk had indulged in enough such to kill permanently anyone with less access to such an extreme restorative medical technology as Vondramach had available. Through self-mutilation and other fun things she’d had to replace most of her vascular, muscular, and skeletal systems, as well as a good deal of neural matter, several times over. And when the synapse-jamming techniques we’re talking about, spreading from the seventy-eighth sector, first reached Vondramach’s attention, she was fascinated by its possibilities. Even then – especially back then – it was billed as a permanent change. But things like that didn’t bother her. One morning she went in and had her brain jammed. Predictably, after a few days, she decided she didn’t like it. And there were already other things she wanted to inflict on herself. But the jamming takes place within synapses set fairly deep in the brain, kept open or closed by setting up a small, naturally self-reinforcing feedback loop that is at once extremely delicate and extremely tenacious. It can be started by the merest brush of a finely modulated gamma-ray laser over the proper chemical gradient in the myalin sheathing of the nerves adjacent to one of the cerebral pelvises. The only way to stop it, however, is to surgically excise the neural material, or to short it out totally – the side effects of which are not only unpleasant but frequently fatal. And the most disconcerting of the side effects is that the whole pattern, if it is erased in one part of the brain, tends to be remembered by the rest and – assuming you survive excision or short-out – usually reestablishes itself somewhere else almost immediately.’

  ‘It’s one of those …?’

  Japril nodded.
‘You don’t know that much about neural cartography, Marq.’ She smiled. ‘And you know that the one thing we know is just how much you know about practically anything. Anyway, Vondramach Okk, unlike Korga, who only had what Marta, Ynn, and I could ferret out of GI to help, was directly in touch, even by then, with the complete medical resources of eight high-technology worlds – five of which, even at that point in her career, she officially owned. That technology had already generated the beginnings of what was to become GI’s direct neural access system. Vondramach gave an order: “Fix this mess, and fast …!” or an order that boiled down to the same thing. It was the kind she had given many times before. According to this particular loosely documented report, she got what she wanted.

  ‘We’ve borrowed it.’

  ‘What did it turn out to be, Japril?’

  6

  Rescue Concluded

  ‘Finding it began with a reference number to a sealed storage chamber in the uninventoried sections of wing seven of the Okk Museum on Tartouhm.’ (I once spent a week in a vaurine projection of one of the Okk Museum’s twenty-nine wings – the one where they put the Louvre, the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Vatican Library collections that Vondramach had exported, building at a time, to the wing’s lower rotunda, from the ruins of Old Eyrth during the first days of the Seventh K’Tong. [And where they’d come from before that is anyone’s guess.] A momentary memory of those six hours a day touring, absorbing the most minor fragments of the age my great-grands used to gossip about.) ‘We opened it up,’ Japril said, ‘and looked inside.’

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘Physically?’

  ‘We sent a message to open it, had the contents described minutely, and the description and vaurines sent back. You know Vondramach Okk: when she ordered something done, she didn’t just have it done once. When she needed a prosthesis – and throughout her life, what with assassination attempts, not to mention some of her own more bizarre pastimes, she went through quite a number – she usually had between fifty and a few hundred made up, each slightly different, from among which she took her pick.’ (We’ve mentioned several times how big a world is? Now imagine owning some.) ‘What was inside that neglected vault? A set of ornate finger rings, several hundred of them, ranging from a dozen that were small enough to fit a three-year-old child to another dozen big as bracelets for that same child.’