Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Samuel R. Delany

  Then Tinjo, all of ten years old, was shoving Bu aside and, holding my shoulders, jumped naked and wet against me. And, of course, nothing would do her but to lick my face too. ‘All right, Tinjo,’ I said. ‘From you it’s just sloppy.’

  ‘Well, I got your meat,’ she said. ‘And took your bags inside.’ Where she had them on her, I don’t know, since she was stark naked; but she held up her wet hand, in which were my green identidiscs that had dragged my parcels home.

  ‘You’re a love.’ I licked her wet hair. But she must have thought something was very funny. She began to laugh, and her face was burned darker than dragon’s urine by our white sun, all around her black eyes and watered lashes.

  I pocketed my discs.

  Then Small Maxa, who is an albino and will not tan – they had to do something to her skin to keep her from burning and insert darkening lenses behind her livid irises – stepped up in front of me. I bent down, and very seriously she mimed licking my face.

  Something is wrong with her.

  She hates to be touched. But at twelve, she wants to do what everybody else does. ‘Hello, Marq.’ She grinned hugely, creasing her white face like an old human’s. ‘I’ve been building a toy mine that I want you to come see; I love you.’ Then she held out her hand to me and I held out mine – about an inch away from hers. We made motions of shaking. Some of us think she might be crazy in some serious way. But we respect it.

  And Tinjo and Bucephalus were tearing off after each other around the terrace again, now down the steps, now into the water, now up the rocks.

  ‘I’ll come and see your mine after I’ve gone to my room a while. And do you want to see some vaurine recordings of where I’ve been?’

  ‘I love you. Yes, Marq.’ She dropped her eyes; her hands made small ivory fists at her hips – which I always thought meant she wanted to hold you but didn’t dare because the contact would be too unpleasant.

  ‘I’ll see you in a while.’ I put my hand about an inch from her cheek and mimed petting. Still grinning, she blinked, saying nothing by it, save some obscure physiological comment on our dark blue sky, our wide white sun.

  I turned away and walked through immense silver petals, blooming around me in the black wall, turning red.

  Inside, the crystal pillar by the door disappeared top and bottom into black pedestal and capital.

  Large Maxa (my mother the biogeneticist1, evelm) sat on her perch, where she usually does these days, blinking about the hall with quiet, gilded eyes, her gorgeous wings folded about herself, their polychrome membranes rustling in the draught from the high grate to the south court. Egri (my mother the industrial diplomat1, retired, human) squatted beside Max, forearms about her knees, her toenails slightly yellow, her biceps sinewy, her long hair – slightly yellow – thinning over her freckled scalp. A childhood memory of the two of them, engaged in endless discussions in three languages about the complexities of the world and interworld information field, its signifying ramifications, its semiotic specifications. Now they just sit together, keeping each other company, looking up at the balcony platforms across the hall, down through the transparent stretches of flooring at the ball courts below, out at the rest of us.

  Lurking there in the entrance hall – which is the way evelmi from Maxa’s part of the world sit around in their own home caves – they’ve always struck me as probably a little daunting to most visitors.

  But they like it.

  ‘Marq?’ Shoshana (my mother the architectural consultant1, human) came up from the spiral stair through the star pattern in silver set in the maroon clay. It represents an astronomical cluster, called Mu-3, visible in the skies from Velm’s northern hemisphere but not, unfortunately, from Morgre. ‘Glad you’re back.’ Shoshana has hair like a salted helmet. ‘Lights were blinking on the console downstairs. Two students just arrived in the south wing.’ Shoshana’s knuckles are silver berries, ripe and wrinkling in her sixty-eighth year; her hand, over the black globe that was both newel-knob and clock, half obscured the time. In the dark glass the time in Morgre, the Zevia-n-complex a third of the way west round Velm, and Katour, one of the three largest complexes in our world, way off in the north, glimmered in – respectively – brazen, emerald, and carbon light.

  ‘They’re two hours early,’ I said. ‘I called myself rushing to get back here so I’d have some time to myself.’ Regularly, groups of students come to study at Dyethshome, for which, over the last three generations, we have provided the south court. Orienting them is – yes – my job2 while I’m here. ‘I suppose I have to get to it, then.’

  ‘I know you want to go to your room and rest, Marq,’ Large Maxa rumbled, showing a splinter of her wings’ scarlet lining. When I was five and six, she would reward our good behaviour by unfurling them over us while we hissed our delight. ‘You see to them, make them comfortable.’

  ‘Sure, Maxa.’

  Egri blinked, sighed, and really looked more like an evelm than Maxa – which Egri claims is what fifty-four years as an ID1 will do to you.

  ‘I’ll get them set up, Shoshana. Then, after I’ve taken a break, I’ll go back in when the others get here.’ Have you noticed? Whenever you come home, your folks always find something for you to do within the first three minutes.

  I trotted over the reliefs at the foot of the ramp circling above the spillway. We only flood it for parties. The carvings along the spill bottom, done by and of the native evelmi – well before any evelmi married into the Dyeths, or even before there were many evelmi in M-81; only dragons – have always been my favourite. Large Maxa, Kal’k, Sel’v, and N’yn, my evelm parents, were always a bit condescending towards the human kids’ delight in them. For one thing, as far as carvings go, they don’t taste like anything. And N’yn and Sel’v once took all of us, when I was thirteen, on a trip to the R’Rtour-wr, way up north, to see the cliff carvings there, where evelmi live in a squalor and violence which, though I’d heard about it, along with the horrifying tales of human exploitation, I had never seen before. Licking those slime-covered stones to taste the cinnamon and sandalwood – neither human scent really covers the evelmi palate – beneath that dribbling mucus … !

  As I reached the ramp’s crest, I peeled away my tourist reds and got most of them on the suspensor hooks at the first toss. They pulleyed off to be cleaned and folded away. Catwalks circled off towards the balconies.

  The ramp ended in a flowering of mirrors.

  I walked into them.

  4.

  Mirrors swung back and up and out and down; I stepped under the irregular stone arch, traced with emerald guano. (I’ve mentioned the pearlbats …?) High Iiriani behind one of the towering multichromes flung parti-coloured dapplings down through the transparencies and over the amphitheatre’s tiered stones. Low Iiriani-prime was a diamond at the edge of one of the others – did it lend enough light to pale those hues? I could hear the falls, but all I could see from here were a few fountains, the thin jets deflected by suspended vanes.

  I walked down the cracked steps, squinting up among the theatre seats’ ninety rows.

  Each month’s student load is about twenty-five. It can be as low as twelve; it can be as high as thirty. They come to study the art (endless), the architecture (exemplary), the history (frequently embarrassing), or the technology (extensive) of Dyethshome – sometimes some combination or interface. They usually arrive in the late afternoon on the north monoline spur, which takes longer but doesn’t go through Morgre proper; lets them off within sight of the rear grounds – except during hotwind season, when we have someone meet them at the central station and take them here by an underground route. When I come in to meet them, they’re inevitably scattered up around the top ten tiers. I call them down, and after an hour’s orientation, during which I tell them about where they’ll stay in the six storeys of galleries, tunnels, halls, corridors, ramps, lifts, and lounges below the amphitheatre, comprising the subterranean part of the south court, discuss study aids, research guides,
and various ways to get into town, tell them where they can cook, eat, wash, and shit, describe the more and less interesting runs for sex through Morgre, note the public parks offering the most joyous and the most sombre dancing, the pools around which the conversation is the most and the least subtle, we’re usually all on a first-name basis and fairly happy.

  At the foot of the stairs I stepped over the grate; below it water glimmered. Barefoot and naked, I wandered on to the middle of the skene.

  Despite Shoshana’s lights, the amphitheatre was empty.

  Trying to make sure I hadn’t overlooked someone sitting or standing in the very top row, I walked to a side aisle, stepped on the bottom stair, and ran the service number through my mind three times – before I realized I had it wrong.

  I corrected it – and the right side of the steps, on which I was standing, began to escalate me up.

  I looked about the falling rows, left and right.

  Still no one. Passing tier forty-four, I glanced over at the entrance corridor. The light above it was out, which meant no one was still down inside. The globes along its ceiling, as well as the blue lights at both ends, turn on when you enter and off when you leave. I looked back down over the seats, over the rounded roofs of the oest court, across the upper parks of Morgre, to the pitted crust of the Vyalou. Here and there, purple patches were all wound through to the orange east by the fuming Hyte. (Amphitheatre: half-theatre. The other half should always be kilometres of calm sublimity.) When I reached the seventieth or so tier, I stepped off and started walking behind the backs of the seats. At the next aisle, I didn’t bother to start the escalator. I just walked down. I was thinking of calling out, was not sure what to call, and found myself amused at my own hesitancy.

  In the centre of the twenty-first row is the polarized chamber – built with the amphitheatre for those people who wanted to see the performance or the landscape but who did not want to be seen seeing. Invisible from the outside, it appears only as the smallest gap between the row’s two centre seats, perhaps an inch wider than the space between the others. It deflects light and sound around it, so that two people can sit in those two ‘centre’ chairs and hold a whispered conversation with each other and never realize that they are some twelve feet apart. The only thing that doesn’t work is leaning to touch your friend’s hand. Our great joke as children was to have our friends count the seats in that row: though they seem to correspond seat for seat with the row behind and the row before, the count always comes out to ten short, which, after you’ve counted the three tiers five or six times to check, tends to unnerve both evelmi and humans. Students who come here have frequently done their GI homework pretty thoroughly and know of nooks and crannies in this place even I’ve forgotten.

  Just to check, I walked over to the place where I could see nothing but seats and stepped inside.

  She stood up from one of the high-backed chairs. ‘Marq Dyeth …?’

  He remained cross-legged on the cushioned bench, watching me. And did not blink.

  ‘Nea …?’ I said. ‘Nea Thant! What in the worlds brings you here?’

  Through ornate ceiling panes, Iirianilight, twice coloured, caught in the crevice between white gem and silver setting above his thumb’s deeply ridged knuckle. He breathed; and the glare detonated at my right eye’s inner corner. I swayed back a little. Perhaps my eyes narrowed. But I didn’t blink.

  ‘Hello, Marq!’ Nea held out a hand, gloved in red foil. (I took it.) ‘This month I’m one of your students. I wanted to get here early, though. I needed a chance to say hello, to talk – ’

  Beneath the line of a roof tessellations’s shadow, lopsided like a mask, his eyes were black holes out of whose eerie absences he looked at me from under rumpled brows. For all Japril’s explanations, I could only think: But why here …?

  ‘Marq Dyeth, I had to come!’ Nea said, with the growling intensity you should reserve for statements made just before committing murder, but which the Thants used to underline a tenth the things they say. ‘I had to talk to somebody … somebody who would understand. I flew here. I flew across sixteen thousand light-years, alone and terrified, to tell you. It’s about – ’ and somewhere on the other side of dazzlement I heard her voice lose all voicing, her breathing go all breathy – ‘about our reproductive commune, Marq. That’s why I came. There’s a small, unimportant world, Marq, that no one’s ever heard of, called Nepiy. Oh, if you know its name at all it’s because Thadeus mentioned it last time we were here – at your lovely party. But it’s a world with many problems among its impoverished lowlands.’

  He put one great bare foot down on the stone flooring. He leaned forward to put his elbows on the frayed knees of his canvas pants: unhemmed at waist and cuff, belted with some ornamental chain, they and his rings were all he wore. The big hands, one naked, one weighted with metal and stone, hung between his knees from heavy wrists.

  ‘There’s been talk, in many of Nepiy’s geosectors, of the possibility of Cultural Fugue,’ Nea went on. ‘Just recently fifty-two of its hundred-seventy-nine geosectors voted to call in the Family to reconstruct some of its social functions in a less volatile form. Of course there’s some opposition from some of the lower lowland areas more oriented towards the Sygn. But the Family has approached Thadeus and our reproductive commune to serve as a Focus Family – for all of Nepiy!’ She caught her breath.

  He breathed.

  ‘You mean they want you to become Focus Family for an entire world? For Nepiy?’ I tried to remember what I could of that strange form of rule by celebrity, by media, by notoriety. ‘Does Thadeus want to move from one world to another? Do you all want to be bothered with all that publicity and attention?’ I remembered to breathe.

  Again.

  ‘Thadeus thinks it would be exciting. Eulalia wants to do whatever Thad wants. And Clearwater doesn’t care, which amounts to the same thing. Thadeus says it’s our duty; she says it would be exciting. She says when a whole world calls to you in need, you must put aside personal considerations and rise to the occasion. We would be virtually the most important …’ she paused … ‘important family on the entire world. Its rulers, for all practical purposes. In the early days of Dyethshome, among your interstellar visitors there were several visits by Focus Units from various worlds. In the time of Vondramach. So I’ve come here to study them – and yes, I know the study is all pretence. I just want to talk to someone who knows something about interworld relations.’

  And I thought: How could his fingers, even that big, hold so many rings? Three iron ones: four bigger ones of bronze; some were narrow and copper; three, of pale gold, on different fingers, were set with shards of different jades, two, on the same, of bright aluminium, with both agates and opals; the platinum one on his thumb was cast in a shape very like one of our local dragon’s heads, big as a dyll nut and gnawing a mistrock as big.

  ‘Zetzor is a very different world from Velm, Marq. And Nepiy is different from them both. But one thing that Zetzor and Velm share – at least your part of it and my part of it – is that they both function under the Sygn. We have never been seriously religious any more than you have. But to be asked suddenly to adopt a religion that, in a sense, we’ve never really known; to be asked, suddenly, to abandon one world for another, to leave our home – ’ A nervous motion took her a step to the side – in front of him. And I think I actually saw her for the first time, while he became only a brown canvas knee, creased and with a worn spot, the brown curve of a shoulder, reddened further from the ceiling panes, visible at her side, all equally and confusingly astonishing. She looked down at the loose flags, pushed at one with her baggy boot’s soft leather. ‘I love the Thants, Marq. And I’m terrified for us. I’m terrified that Thadeus will get her way. And I’m just as terrified that she won’t.’

  ‘Nea…?’ I said, and did not take a great step either to the left or to the right. ‘Look, maybe we should go inside and talk to Egri about this.’ I think there was a slight ringing in my ears. Lo
w in my abdomen it was as if a bubble had suddenly blown up to push all my organs around into uncomfortable positions. I mean, what do you do when you first see your perfect erotic object and have been assured, by unimpeachable sources, that the perfection is mutual? (The one thing I can vouch for; I never had the slightest question who he was.) ‘Come on, Nea,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  With neither nod nor smile, and my ears and knees heating with diplomatic embarrassment, I fled the chamber.

  Nea came after me. (Did she look back at her companion and excuse herself? I didn’t hear. I didn’t see.) She caught up to me when we were halfway down to the skene. (And from the invisible chamber, he watched me with his invisible eyes.) As we stepped out on to the amphitheatre stage, me naked and her in leather and foil, I think I was about to turn around and rush back, when Nea said, in a funny kind of voice: ‘What a strange one, Marq … ! I could tell you felt it too!’

  ‘Nea,’ I asked, and felt like a fool for it, for somehow with all I knew, I didn’t know at all: ‘Who is …?’ I began but was afraid to place before her the pronoun that would place me with … him.

  ‘She is rather odd,’ Nea said, confirming what, I was unsure. ‘She’s just another one of your students – at least I assume so. We got to talking on the monoline down. In the whole trip, I didn’t manage to get her name. But I gather she’s from very far away.’ Then, as we stepped across the grill and started up the cracked steps, she gave a great sigh, and I could almost hear her thoughts travel thousands of light-years off. We reached the top of the stair, beneath hanging green. Mirrored blades swung in and out at us.

  5.