Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Samuel R. Delany

  The first sound came. (Why didn’t he open his eyes?) I have heard some evelmi say the untutored human voice is generally more pleasant to them in song than the trained one – even though they respect the training’s intention. The rougher vibrations more resemble the multiplicity of sounds from multiple tongues. The speech impediment that blurred his accent leached all pitch from the note; but pitch is not the priority in hunting songs. That’s why evelmian concepts of harmony, which are quite complex, are nevertheless so difficult for human ears. What I heard first, by whatever part of the ear meters and measures and counts despite all conscious intention, was … well, as clear as any pattern I’d heard that many times: dactyl, spondee, dactyl, trochee – the second beat of the spondee alliterating with the first beat of the second dactyl, and the alliterating sound repeated a third time on one or the other of the trochee’s syllables. That, at any rate, is how Vondramach began her description of the form. Though Okk invented her own language, Okk scholars have been debating for years where she took her terms for prosody from. The only thing everyone agrees on is that they’re not hers, and go back a ways. Spondee, double trochees (that rhyme), spondee, with the stressed syllable in the following anapest alliterating with the first syllable of the initial dactyl; then iamb. Now the first cesura: then dactyl (its first two syllables alliterating), trochees, second cesura; anapest, trochee … What was coming out of Rat’s mouth was the form which had once taken me three months to master: Vondramach’s version of a kahoud’di’i’mar. The words, however, were improvised and his own. I’ve written them out for you once, though without their rough melody: ‘Doubled in one sense, skewed in four others, my wings under-thundered grey sand in a dragon’s …’ I listened, searching for explanation. (‘… Rat, written all over her, at least to my tongue, rose up, flapping wings, body bending …’) There’s a fairly simple one, though my mind had to scurry after it in the midst of my astonishment. On the high-silver soil and shale about, convocations of rock can act like reflecting antennae; and partial overlay of his hunting experience into my memory or mine into his was certainly possible if his bow shot or mine had hit such a hidden silver mass at the proper angle. Partial exchange? It had happened to me two or three times before and hunters’ tales are full of them. But such a complete one? The only reason I could put together how he could have lifted the whole songform from my mind to fill it with his own roughly accented language was simply that we had another example of Japril’s decimals at work. Through his recital, I watched Rat, then the Old Hunter. She seemed pleased with her young hunter, the Yellow Dragon’s Daughter. Well, she had reason. But watching her, hearing him, I realized that most of my fears for the stranger loose in the alien land were unnecessary. Whether he observed the proper information on his own, picked it up by whatever method from me, or figured it out on his fingers, whatever labour he laid to the task, the transition to my home world seemed for him no more than the rushed flights of gnats returning to the surface of some oil slick, perturbed perhaps because of the shifts in its rainbow colours, but still recognizing the basic scents they had left it with when they had abandoned it in the morning. I looked at the two women as Rat concluded his song. (After an anacrusis, the initial spondee repeated, followed by the four final dactyls, terminating with a long tough unstressed syllable:) ‘… cerebral surface that, neurally congruent, women and dragons share –’

  When Rat finished, the Old Hunter was already turning, already moving away – we Velmians on this side of the Fayne-Vyalou are great on greetings but not much on good-byes; and the Old Hunter had heard many songs, would hear many more. A hasty departure was another of her rights.

  But both the women stayed; as I waited, curious, and Rat waited for me to finish waiting, Ollivet’t took a few steps forward. She said: ‘Nice singing,’ with one tongue out the side of her wide scaled mouth and her head cocked to one side.

  ‘Yours too.’ Tell me how I knew they were tourists in our area; they weren’t in reds. ‘Has the hunting been all you hoped?’ Tell me if Korga knew.

  ‘We’ve enjoyed it. Do you know the area well?’

  ‘I’ve hunted in it on and off for twenty years.’

  The women looked at each other and made their respective racial signs for relieved amusement.

  Shalleme stepped up beside her companion. ‘Perhaps then you know the way to Morgre complex? We’ve been hunting down along the whole length of the Fayne for six weeks now. But it’s not too well marked around here.’

  ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘None of the local hunters you ran into could help you? I’ve known the one who presided here for years. I’m sure she would have given you directions.’

  Ollivet’t said, ‘I have not hunted in her territory for more than thirty. So I did not feel I knew her well enough to interrupt the proceedings.’

  I nodded. ‘I see. And there was no other Old Hunter that you encountered locally?’

  ‘We ran into one,’ Ollivet’t said. ‘She had wonderful songs, a great store and fund of lore –’

  ‘But she hadn’t the faintest idea where the urban complex was,’ Shalleme finished up. ‘Well, that’s hunters for you. We were hoping we might follow someone in. Our scooters are only about a kilometre away …’

  I glanced at Rat: odd how I was slowly learning to read approval in his silver eyes, though they, of course, were what actually remained unchanged in the still face around them.

  ‘Your song,’ he said, suddenly and surprisingly to the woman, ‘was wonderful.’

  Shalleme looked at his alien eyes with her human ones. ‘So was yours, Yellow Dragon’s Daughter.’

  I said: ‘I don’t see why we couldn’t –’

  11

  A Tale of Two Suppers

  We’d come with one scooter and small daykits. They’d come down, they told us, with two; and daykit enough for weeks.

  They went off to get them.

  Rat leaned against our tandem. ‘Will they have trouble finding us?’

  ‘The radar-bows.’ I joggled mine, so that it slid fully down into its holder ‘They put out a homing beacon in case you get lost. Or in case someone else wants to find you.’

  Two scooters turned round a distant dune, both riders now crimson in tourist coveralls. Ollivet’t hailed me with a red-draped wing over her bow sails.

  ‘Come on.’ As I straddled the saddle, Rat pushed the brace closed around his own bow, and straddled behind me, hand on my shoulder, hand on my flank.

  I stamped stirrups.

  Moustache tickled back at my upper lip; beard flattened to my chin. The wind put her three cool paw-pads on my chest and knees.

  We skimmed warm sand and mica.

  2.

  As you come in from the hunting grounds at daytime, Morgre looks very different from my room’s night-time view. Thin sculptures designating the old travel guide, from the pre-human days when neuter and female evelmi who could fly did a lot, leaned beside the human-built highway: pedestals and ten-metre clear display walls preserved by the evelm-human organizations who concern themselves with such. Bowsail shadows shivered on pitted topping.

  Overhead a propeller platform moved above clouds.

  Right, humping above a shoulder of blue needles, tolgoth hid the -wr and its fumes. In the distance, Morgre was smudges behind girder-work, with a few towering stone supports walling its north end.

  The webwork of feed-paths on our left stretched away to the child’s red toys of the Myaluths, interrupted here by a weather tower, there by the verdigrised dome of one of the forty-thousand-cubic-metre water pumps that sucked the lower wet-sands dry, worked by a convocation of huge, flapping thermofoils taking power from Iiriani. At this range they looked like miniature radar-bows dancing beside the greeny globes, over the orange sand.

  I don’t recall when I noticed the half-dozen scooters zagging the narrow paths laid along the ancient runways. I first thought they were another hunting party – only no bows glinted and flopped on their racks.

  I h
ad been aware of them for five or six minutes when I realized, for all their swerving back and forth, how closely they paralleled us.

  I thought of speaking over my shoulder to Rat. But air chattered by my ears. Then a moment of heat at my right cheek: Rat’s mouth brushed it as he leaned close to shout: ‘They’re following us, Marq …’ which was neither about our northerners in reds behind us, I realized, nor the group of six. As I glanced back (his mouth still closing over my name), I saw, behind and beyond them, another twenty – no, forty, or even fifty – scooters gliding along the sandy strips that lay like gold ribbons in an orange sandscape that would go copper at Iirianiset.

  Negotiating the interwoven paths, lingering scooters joined the lead group. And I looked up – our scooter lurched a little – because the creatures labouring maybe a hundred metres above in the air were not small dragons, but some dozen evelm women.

  The sky was streaked with the clouds we call fireneedles here and which, only fifty k’s to the east, are called ’manshair: nobbly filaments of darkness like wires across Iiriani.

  But do you know how rare it is to see evelmi fly?

  They flocked.

  Among the riders were more humans than one would have expected with a random gathering; almost forty per cent.

  Flyers and riders flocked nearer.

  I looked back over Rat’s arm at the two red figures following.

  Ahead, three or five feed-paths fed on to the highway – and a hundred metres further, three or five more.

  Six, a dozen, twenty scooters splatted noise and shadow on to the road. Sound around us trebled. Bony faces passed, staring – too many without scales. (When humans mass in too great numbers on Velm, though I am one, I think of the dangerous north.) Zub and zub zub zub and zub zub, in the welter and rumble passing. Glancing right, I saw a dark face: her gum bluish, her black eyes narrowed in the wind, watching, her blue-black claws clamping her machine’s guide bar. Then she dropped away among and behind others. Skimmers pulled ahead and fell behind. Their draughts slapped us like dragon wings.

  I wanted to call out and could think of nothing to call. I mauled my guide bar with my hands and marvelled Korga’s hands did not maul me. We grumbled up on another sand-spilled junction. And, as the scooters had come, they went.

  Scooters growled away along feed-paths, out across the plane.

  We moved down the raw highway in our own quiet roar; I glanced aside to watch scooters dispersing over the sandy web, under the unsettling flights of the women.

  On my left, sound increased. I shifted my shoulders under Rat’s hands, and turned to see first Ollivet’t’s, then Shalleme’s scooter pull abreast. Ollivet’t said with three tongues at once, loud enough to cover it:

  ‘WHAT WAS THAT?’

  ‘WHAT WAS THAT?’

  ‘WHAT WAS THAT?’

  I shouted, loud as I could (it doesn’t compete): ‘I’LL TELL YOU LATER.’ Then as an afterthought: ‘YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE ME IF I DID,’ and hoped Shalleme could read my lips. It’s a talent many of us humans have been developing as a sort of racial compensation.

  Their scooters fell behind, and I watched them to detect some reason in their passage – saw only their intent at driving.

  Morgre’s stone walls – we were coming in at the Broidwey Tunnel – loomed, blotched high as the wingspread of a neuter dragon with the rock-algae that gives the stony Fayne (but not the Vyalou) its characteristic purple. We dived in.

  3.

  I’d never seen this many people in an industrial rotunda. Vaulted mosaics hung thirty metres above the covered catwalks, crane housings, and grapples. Guide patterns flickered and faded in clear flooring, dark as Korga’s eyes, beneath myriad clawed and nailed feet. I pulled to a stop before a dozen parked scooters, beside the ambling crowds. Fifty metres away behind a wire-mesh wall, a roller ribbon hauled its load of cartons to rotundas further on.

  Ollivet’t and Shalleme pulled up beside me. The rotunda roared. More scooters echoed in behind us.

  ‘What’s happening? Shalleme asked.

  With wavering wings, Ollivet’t pulled scaly claws free of her foot holders and came to four feet beside her machine, searching among the crowd. Turning to Shahleme, she showed the tongue configuration (one larger and two smaller) that means the unimportant questioning one could ignore.

  Shalleme ignored it. ‘Is there something wrong?’ she asked Rat – at least the question began at him. It finished at me, probably because he wasn’t looking at her.

  ‘No,’ I said, realizing I didn’t know how to explain what I suspected. ‘No, there’s nothing wrong. At least I don’t think –’ Then I looked at Rat.

  He was watching my foot – I’d been kicking at the stand to get it down.

  Rat said: ‘No. No, there’s nothing wrong.’

  Shalleme looked around again.

  And Ollivet’t’s wings were moving.

  I still hadn’t gotten the stand down right.

  ‘Marq?’ Rat asked.

  ‘What?’ I got it.

  ‘I think most of these people are here because I –’

  ‘Skinura Marq!’ The voice, at initial and final consonant, singsonged.

  All ivory today, she strolled up through the gathered women. Most were facing away, the evelmi now and again rearing to see over those before them, the humans now and again jumping. She was tall, closer to Rat’s height than mine. Her white body mask was shot with silver. I recognized her as the woman who had come up around my room with the students, as the white peeled away from her red skullcap, from her brown round face with its epicanthiced eyes, this time her amber irises filigreed with black. ‘Ah,’ she declared, ‘by my ancestors on Eurd, so it really is Skepta Marq. I do not need to inquire after the identity of your friend. I already know of Rat by legend and report.’ She turned to our hunting companions, as the body mask fell away from her lean neck. The gold bar with its ruby-tipped wires dropped on its chain across her sharp shoulders, down her long flat breasts. ‘But these …?’

  Ollivet’t said: ‘This is my companion, Shalleme Doru,’ with one tongue and, ‘I’m Ollivet’t Doru,’ with another.

  ‘Ah, it’s Skalla Ollivet’t and Skri Shalleme? Well, I’m delighted. But really – ’ The petals collapsed from her waist to suggest, below her breasts and belly, an oddly panelled skirt. She made the awkward bow of the very tall. ‘Enchanted. Now you must all come with me.’

  ‘There!’ someone called.

  I looked sharply around.

  ‘Over there?’ and, ‘I think it’s …’ echoed under the rotunda ceiling. But the surge of people moved somewhere to the right. Fifty of them? A hundred-fifty? When you are simply unused to crowds, it’s difficult to evaluate their number. I only know that there were more people around than could fit in the Dyethshome amphitheatre.

  ‘Really,’ the tall woman said, ‘I think all you honourable Skryonchatyn should come with me. If they recognize you …’ She inclined her head towards Rat.

  ‘I don’t under – ’ Ollivet’t began with one tongue. ‘I mean,’ another continued, ‘we were only coming into the city here to –’

  ‘All of you,’ the woman said. ‘You must agree with me, no? It would be safer.’

  ‘But what about the scooters?’ Shalleme asked. ‘We were going to park them at the local hunting union before we – ’

  ‘You can see – or does it require a logical leap not usual in your culture? You can not get anywhere near the union’s port. If you like, we will leave you here to try—’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ll disc the scooters, and you two can pick them up at Dyethshome later.’ I pushed a hand under the rough flap of our daykit and grubbed in twine, cloth, and small containers for the plastic-covered circles. I drew out a handful. ‘Here.’ I pressed the adhesive side of the green discs against the fork of our tandem, then turned to press two more against the forks of the other women’s. ‘They’ll be at Dyethshome in half an hour, waiting for you. It’s very easy to find: the l
argest out-city co-op to the oest. Just ask for Whitefalls. Anyone can set you on the proper roller.’

  ‘Dyethshome,’ Shalleme said, turning to Ollivet’t. ‘Wasn’t that where Kessell and Via-pr’d went to study2 about six or seven years back …?’

  In the dim light, Rat, his eyes flickering between green and clear, said: ‘Who are you?’

  The tall woman, her hands at her side, her chin raising just a trifle, said: ‘My name is JoBonnot. Remember that name, Rat Korga. No one likes advice. I give you some anyway. Remember that name. Please.’ She glanced at me.

  I turned from the foreigners, wondering what status accrued in that honorific-clotted home tongue to those free of all of them; and someone else shouted: ‘There! Just over there.’

  The black floor beneath us flared. Six inches down in the clear plastic, three-metre arrows suddenly mapped lapped paths about the rotunda. I realized as I looked around us that Rat, in a fuzzy glow of red, was the centre of them all.

  ‘Come with me!’ JoBonnot barked. ‘Now they really have seen you!’

  I began: ‘But where –?’

  ‘We have supper with your sister tonight, Marq,’ Rat said, which, in the circumstances, seemed the oddest thing to remind me of.

  But JoBonnot grinned at me with perfectly insistent delight. ‘Ah, yes. A message from your sister, the prudent and insightful Skern Black-lars,’ which was the way she pronounced it: not Black Lars, but Black-lars. ‘Her informal supper for the evening has been cancelled. If you do not believe me, check the first time we reach a call station. Now come!’

  I wasn’t in mind to argue. ‘We’ll go with you.’

  The women scattered near, all faces now, were – most of them – backing away. But between, I could see women running up.

  I pushed Rat’s elbow with one hand and slapped at the back of Ollivet’t’s mid-haunch with the other (comes from a local kids’ game in which, by such slaps, you urge each other to run); JoBonnot shoved at Shalleme’s arm with a gesture enough like mine to make the ID in me speculate briefly on the convergence of childhood games grown up worlds apart.