‘JoBonnot,’ I said, ‘Rat Korga is gone. He’s not on … on Velm any more. On my world.’
‘Look up,’ she said. ‘Look at the real stars in the real sky that you can’t see from here because the damned lights are too bright and because there are three freestanding multichrome walls around this amphitheatre that block out anything interesting.’
I frowned. ‘Where has Japril …?’
She laughed. ‘Oh, what a marvellous and charming fool you are, my most undiplomatic Marq Dyeth! It starts on Zetzor and ends at my home, Nepiy. My world, Marq Dyeth. Where they are soon to be something close to kings. Oh, Skena Marq, as we gaze up at your own world’s sky, tonight, do you know what it is that you don’t see there? Do you know what sweeps invisible across it, even as I speak?’
‘What?’
‘A fleet of three hundred-sixty thousand Xlv ships, circling, circling, circling this world, your world, Velm, in orbits ranging from nineteen minutes to point-oh-two hours in duration. That’s very fast. No, don’t worry. They won’t do anything. I have more information about this than you. They’re watching. Watching you. Ah, I am receiving a report now … yes, some of them have started to leave already. The Web shuttle, flown by three cunning spiders, has just lifted above them, you see, and is labouring out between your two tiny moons.’ She snorted a little, behind the white and red striped plastic covering. The sound came clearly through the grill at her mouth. ‘Myself, I’m quite terrified, sitting here, on your world, knowing what I know about Korga, the Xlv, you, Rhyonon, Velm … Really, you are the most disrupting and random of factors in a very complex equation, Marq Dyeth. I am terrified, yes. But I am also profoundly sane. What such sanity as I have gains me is a good sense of what terrors to trust and what terrors to fight, even to death. Have you figured out, yet, that I can help you, Skene Marq?’
‘Can you help me find Rat Korga?’
She turned to look up among the amphitheatre seats, while students did not look at us, did not stop whispering and walking. Above the ninetieth ring, among the shadowy statuary, I fancied I saw a short, heavyset male. And in the moment I thought I saw, I was sure she was waiting for the tall woman in the red and white body-mask before me.
‘You have a job1 to do, Marq Dyeth. Go back to your room and prepare to do it.’ In a single motion she stood, turned, and was at the skene edge, from which she leaped down. She clambered up over seats, now stepping on a cushion, now on the stone between. I read her motion as a headlong rush towards the distant figure who, later, I decided was just some sort of shadow, a projection of my own anxieties, my own terror for my threatened world. After all, he looked too much like me.
At the twenty-first row, she disappeared.
So had the mysterious male.
I started to call out, but a vast paralysis seized me that any attempt to break made that muscle – foot or tongue or hand or heel – cramp with pain. The theatre around me swam and cleared and swam again as I blinked away the waters in my eyes. My cheek became a spill.
All the little traps about the stage edge were closed.
And JoBonnot had vanished into the polarized chamber.
I dragged in some loud, raucous breath; and didn’t fall. Only one student – the evelm algae farmer1 – even looked up.
EPILOGUE
Morning
Night passed; another night followed; and another. I don’t remember when, among them, I first realized that I had no memory of the morning after his departure. The morning before? How could I forget rolling from my sleeping mat on my six-legged bed, the expectation of the hunt, the lizard perch, the trip to the student quarters and his seamless waking. Yet the morning after is as blank as the other is vivid. Time articulated itself over nights, days, evenings – and, yes, more mornings. But as, among them now, I began to move, to work2, to function, to work1, I found myself dwelling on that dawn absence in memory’s continuity, caused certainly by the intensity of loss, the absolute vanishing of the possible. Recollection, which custom edits as it sediments, is a notorious trickster. Yet what’s sedimented here is forgetfulness itself. I suppose if I were going to dwell on an absence, it would be easier to ponder what, by a slip of chance, I missed than what, through an imponderable clash of chance, I had lost. Some midnight, some noon, on my world or another or halfway through the dark between, I would try again to recall that subsequent waking, those first thoughts on the first day without him, but as soon as I would press my mind against the edgeless dislocation that marked the nothingness between that night’s half-sleep and a loggy waking, an exhausting frustration would couple with, finally, some kind of wilful inattention and slip my mind to alternate dawns. For while we search out one fugitive reflection, another can snag the disengaged and free-spinning engine of effort; and I would end up reviewing, say, this most rehearsed of recollections. From another world and neither the most vivid nor the earliest, it is still among my most tenacious memories. I was perhaps ten. I don’t know which world it was, but it must have been one on which we’d stopped en route to Senthy.
Night:
A trip across an open field, on my back, in some flapping container, while shadows loomed hundreds of metres into the air around. Wind tugged at the scarred translucent covering, and I realized at one point that I was being borne by beast, not machine. I know I drifted off to sleep. And I know now that while I slept I could as easily have been carried a thousand light-years as a thousand kilometres.
I woke.
Gauze hung around me; light poured through an octagonal opening in a slanting wall. I pushed up on the sleeping pad, scrambled through the gauze, did not go through several dark openings lower down, but clambered through the bright one. Air. Sky. Something smooth under my hands; something rough under my-feet; and the pithy taste of an atmosphere not mine.
I stood up outside.
The pale blue near the horizon became much darker overhead, which later I would learn meant a world with an artificial atmosphere held down by force.
A sandy horizon, grey, flat: here and there black rocks broke it. Here and there dark machines laboured on it.
I don’t remember if the gravity was slightly more or slightly less than I was used to.
But I knew some things about my location. The thrumming down below the metal plates I stood on had something to do with large pumps and a small water supply. Inside the great, shaggy fences off to the left were beasts similar to the ones that had borne my carrier before. But the isolation of these facts suggests things I’d either been told or figured for myself. They do not sit among a galaxy of facts as do data acquired from General Information. I sidestepped down … a rut? A gully? The crease in the loose soil, its bottom filled with pebbles, could have been the result of either attention or erosion.
With round black rocks set among flat tan ones, a stone wall rose to a mossy overhang at about eye-level. My ten-year-old toes and fingers would find easy purchase in those crevices. I was human. It never occurred to me not to climb it.
As I put one bare foot on the sandy stone, above the wall I suddenly saw a brownish stalk, on the end of which were five or six transparent globes, packed and backed with dim foil, each of them folded within dark membranes, which closed and opened, now over one, now over another, so that – I suddenly realized – I was gazing at an alien gazing at an alien gaze.
Yes, the reality struck me in that complex a set of terms.
The eyestalk retreated.
Pebble hit pebble on the other side; I heard a scrabbling, then movement away.
I wasn’t scared; I didn’t feel confused. The encounter halted me, and I stood – halted – staring above the mossy rocks for a while. Then I climbed again.
Elbows fixed on the gritty stone, I leaned over. On the dirt below, the regular squiggles certainly looked like tracks, but not from a creature with feet as I knew them.
They angled from the wall, stopped for a metre, then took up for another two, stopped … if they took up again, they were lost in the rock-
pocked sands.
Had it squirmed away?
Had it leapt?
I felt around with one foot to continue my climb.
‘Marq –?’
I glanced behind me in the windless air that (later) I would connect with large open expanses on a newly planoformed world.
‘Marq, please come down from there!’
I don’t know whether it was Hatti or Sel’v who called.
‘Really, dear, you don’t know where you are, and while I’m sure nothing’s here that can hurt you, still, until Genya gets here, I wish you’d come back to the compound. It’s very early.’
In the trip to foggy, gardened and oceaned Senthy, somehow that interim world never got a name. Often, though, I have thought that this, my first unfettered experience of alien life, had far more to do with my choosing my particular profession1 than all the force of Genya, Egri, or my older sisters together.
But why, I wonder, when I tell you of that morning memory, does this one come to interrupt? (The more we come to rely on GI, the more our daily consciousness becomes subservient to memory’s wanderings; and day begins with morning.) A dozen or so had gathered in the ship’s viewing chamber. The transparent canopy was most of a half-sphere that went down to the metre-high black wall. Only a dozen of us, from among the thousands on the ship, had contracted to go without anti-anxiety drugs for a day and had been taking, instead, for the last three hours, the capsules that actually had to be swallowed with long draughts of water from special collapsible containers.
‘Shortly we will deopaque – ’ which is a solecism in Arachnia too – ‘the viewing canopy, and you will be able to look directly on what is, to date, the largest known object in the galaxy: the central red giant of the Aurigae system. We are at a distance of just slightly under thirty light-minutes from the stellar surface. Its mass is approximately two hundred thousand times that of a standard G-type star, such as Sol. Its diameter, were it in the centre of the Sol system – ’ this, you can tell, was a Family ship – ‘would engulf Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, the asteroid belt, Saturn, Jupiter, and extend halfway to Uranus.’ (It’s always strange to hear aloud information that you’ve just received, minutes back, through GI – that extended déjà vu of the ear.) ‘When we transpare the viewing canopy, the sky will be dark blue; that is because we are well within Aurigae’s atmosphere – an atmosphere which, at this distance, is hundreds of times thinner even than Mars’s, but which, because it extends for practically half a light-year, has a diffraction ability to rival your home worlds’. We will use the viewing chamber’s simulation facilities to imitate a rotation of the ship, so that the stellar disc of Aurigae will appear to rise to your left, cross the sky, then set on your right.’
Blessedly, as the dome began to clear, there was no music.
Oddly, I didn’t think ‘sky’ before that purple distance. (It wasn’t really blue.) Indeed, I thought only that something a little more than near-vacuum extended before me half a light-year.
It was luminous purple. There were a few stars visible in it. From GI, I knew that there were other stars among the thirty or so that made up the Aurigae system, at least three of which were almost half as big as Aurigae itself.
They were all moving to the right.
Then, left, a line of red. (And some music did start: diatonic, full of trumpets, half a millennium old, no doubt a Family import from Old Earth itself.) It was curved, yes. But it looked like a wall, not a sun. The wall was mottled red and black and brown, and moved up over the viewing bubble. ‘Aurigae’s surface temperature is no more than 650 degrees Celsius. Its composition is mostly helium. Its average density is substantially less than that of water, but is substantially more than that of gaseous hydrogen at one standard gravity. It has been estimated that had Aurigae been only two per cent denser, it would have collapsed into a black hole at least a billion and a half years ago. Less than point-oh-seven per cent of the stars in our galaxy are in the narrow margin of mass required to become such super-giants. Ordinarily. red giants, of course, are a tenth the diameter and fairly common. Of these super-giants, Aurigae was discovered from Earth and almost immediately estimated as the largest stellar object in the universe (though its actual mass and size, until the advent of space travel, were underestimated by several decimal orders of magnitude); it is still, as far as we know, the largest, though there have been, to date, ninety-three other giant stars, still expanding, that within another two billion years will be substantially larger than Aurigae today. By that time, Aurigae itself will have begun to contract. The darker areas that you see in swirls over the stellar surface are mammoth tidal areas where the surface temperature of the star has fallen as low as 450 degrees. At the surface of Aurigae, emitted light would not be enough to produce the bright display we are currently seeing, unless internal temperatures, many thousands of times greater, did not cause what is sometimes known as the photon-cascade effect, which only occurs in gravitic fields more than six hundred times Earth standard, and which, unknown until three hundred years ago, is responsible for both pulsars and quasars, phenomena that once mystified early Earth astronomers, and caused the original underestimation of Aurigae’s size.’ By now the deep red, glimmering field had risen to cover half the bubble. The curvature was visible, but you had to look back and forth to see the expanse of it. ‘The smallest of those mottled dark spots which you can see in the glow are large enough to absorb the planet Jupiter without visible disturbance – indeed, if Jupiter were at the stellar surface, it would take up a space one-one-hundredth as many seconds of an arc as your own little fingernail when looked at at arm’s length.’ For moments, wider and higher than my own vision, red and black Aurigae was all I saw. Then – how many hypnotic minutes later – to the left, the slightest purple atmosphere, scimitaring the glimmer. ‘We will halt the simulated rotation of the ship with the stellar disc set to a minimum of thirty-four per cent of the viewing canopy, as you saw it in the vaurine brochure. You will have another hour to observe it, before we once again opaque the chamber and request that you return to your sleeping cells. Again, let us remind you that no further drugs need to be taken to return you to semi-somnolence. They will be administered automatically through the air.’
The motion stopped.
The music died.
One and another of us, we looked at each other, then up at the swollen star. Over half the women on the ship, as I recall, were not human – but I don’t recall which species they were. One – who was – looked at me with a small, cramped laugh: ‘It is large!’
My own laugh was probably no less cramped.
We were the first two to rise from our benches. For about fifteen minutes we walked to this side of the chamber, then that side, looking up at the purple, whose diffraction indeed was like no planetary atmosphere I’ve ever been in, now out and down and around at the star into which Iiriani, not to mention Iiriani-prime, might both have fallen without a noticeable splatter.
One and another, people began to leave.
Eventually I was left with only one other woman. She had a small steel-mesh disc among the fleshy folds of reddish skin (darker than Aurigae) which, just as I realized it was a human-speech translation device, began to talk:
‘Were you at all offended that they gave you the analogic information in Solar Systemic terms, human?’
I smiled. ‘Myself, I’m much more comfortable on Sygnstyle ships than on Family ones – true. But I suppose I just took it as a somewhat chauvinistic habit left over from the dawn of space travel. GI converts it into whatever terms you’re most familiar with, anyway.’
‘An intriguing strategy,’ the bland and inhumanly self-assured voice addressed me while fold on fold thrilled and rippled. ‘I spent six years on Old Earth – at least a planet called Earth. I was at North China University.’
I did not make the standard comment I would have on my own world about universities being a wonderful way to travel. ‘University life always seemed a fine way to age.’
<
br /> ‘Ah, yes. One does seem to age there. Talk of Solarcentric chauvinism is frequently a good opening conversational gambit for humans of a certain Familiar orientation, I find.’
‘Is it?’ My world was a Sygn world; but then she was not human. ‘It seems somehow strange to me to talk of Solarcentricism before something like that.’ I gestured towards the great sun.
‘How true,’ returned the measured, featureless voice. ‘I would chuckle in amused agreement, but the laughter switches of my translator have been malfunctioning for the past six hours. You understand.’
‘Certainly,’ I said. And somehow felt much more comfortable. ‘Now, myself, I’ve never been to an Earth.’
‘And here I would laugh with surprise if I could!’ the alien exclaimed. ‘How provincial of me, to assume, just because you are human …’
‘Oh, I’m sure there is a flavour about all my movements and manners that gives you a taste of my origins.’
‘Flavour? Ah, yes. Myself, I have twelve different faculties that you would call senses. But the ones you humans call sight, taste, and smell are not among them. Oh, you have no idea how much difficulty that gave me on your planet – your racial origin planet, that is. (If, indeed, it was!) At your university. Eventually though, through trial and error, I was able to develop quite a complex algorithm for translation purposes. I’m very proud of it, really. It’s never failed me yet. Your binocular vision, I know, can actually perceive directly the spherical solidity of that great globe. I can’t, not at this distance.’
I looked out at the sun again. Yes, the parallax of my minuscule eyes was enough to register its stupendous curvature. ‘As a matter of fact I can. It does curve away. Tell me, which sense are you perceiving it with?’
‘I? How polite of you! It’s a kind of aural rendition that requires the light to be translated into ultrasound waves. Indeed, it sounds like one of my own home world’s dawns, only much vaster, harmonious, resonant.’
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Page 40