Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Samuel R. Delany

  I looked up at the purplish immensity that was all space for half a light-year, but which, from here, seemed smaller than the star that filled it. ‘It does remind me of a strange and alien morning.’

  ‘In the light of such a sun, one would think it should always be noon. Yet morning is certainly the way it strikes me. Do you agree?’

  I nodded, wondering at the vagaries of translation. ‘To me,’ I said, ‘it seems at once both bitter and sweet; it speaks to me of concatenations of tastes as eccentric as mace, vinegared lichen, and powdered alum served three hours after sunset at the very moment when the musicians cease to play – it casts me out of myself, then hurls me back like a suddenly encountered odour from childhood that, as I name it, I only then realize I have mistaken for some other, and I am forced to contemplate all the possibilities that, in their shadings and subtleties, must be as varied as the red and black variegations on that star itself, and thus I am struck with the notion of something so large it might as well be infinite, so old it might as well be eternal.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said that steel translator’s voice for this creature who possibly possessed none of her own. She started to drift along the rail, rippling. ‘That is precisely the way it sounds to me. I could not have put it better,’ leaving me to wonder what, precisely, precision was on the other side of that steel disc. That she and I had both found something matutinal to contemplate, for whatever our vastly different reasons, in that huge fire, seemed the most stupendous of cosmic accidents and was, finally, where all real wonder lay.

  To arrive at dawn on a world where you have departed night-time (or daytime – no matter) from some spot on that same world is to enter a welter of possibilities. I recall my departure from the moonlit shore and, an hour later, my arrival at the morning Flame Fields of Rhyss’kelton where, beyond the great ceramic baffles, the flickering light darkens the sky into a parody of night, even when their tiny sun had lifted above the broken horizon. As I walked along the covered arches that wormed through the air from one governmental institution to the next, I looked down over the rail, through the clear wall at the lavid fissures a hundred metres below, hot with copper and rose. But every dawn-time flicker over the artfully bland facades I could read as a sign whose meaning had been given me by my previous nights, days, evenings on the world itself, signs I knew, even if I had hopelessly mislocated them on this particular fragment of it, signs that would adjust and rearrange as the day and days went on: a situation that allowed morning to be a beginning by anchoring it to a succession of days and nights – an arrival inscribed all over by an obsessive security that a person who has lived on a single world can never really know, because she has never been without it.

  But have you ever arrived on a world at dawn?

  The ship orbits, usually for an hour or three, before landing. As one watches in the binocs (that the better ships provide to tape over your eyes) you can see the world, this one orange and green with hydrocarbon soups, that one blue and white with oxidized hydrogen broths, another grit grey, still another dust brown, but all, whatever their dominant colour, scythed away, as one circles, with night.

  If your mind turns in such aubadinal directions, you become intensely aware how arbitrary a concept dawn is.

  First of all, it is all choice: to arrive on a world in the morning is a decision completely at the whim of those conscious priorities that run from pragmatics to aesthetics. Power and desire are both given voice, each allowed their necessary pages in the decisionary print-out.

  The tumble – where they tell you not to look – feels, most of it, not like the soar through space, but rather like a jarring, an inadvertent jiggling, that would shake up some container in an earthquake, lodged at a mine’s bottom.

  And on the vast majority of worlds, when you emerge from that ill-bounded structure, the ship, you are (more or less) underground.

  Sets of identification crystals spin in invisible reading fields between tall worn elements; a moving roadway, which I realized to my astonishment from the hum underfoot, was propelled by mechanical rollers; and I emerged from a round kiosk in what at first looked like some horizon-to-horizon rippling mirror: water, but it was rare that I had seen so much of it at once. Only a few centimetres deep, I was later told. And here and there lay the purple and green algae-patches harvested over the grand-paddy with those tall cranes, most, at this hour, immobile across the silver flats. To my left the sky was dark. To my right, red washed through the overcast. On a metre-wide ridge of wet gravel ribboning away, some women in heavy boots, bulbous gloves, and tarnished metallic suits crunched up. Most of them looked at me – one or two smiled, as if in acknowledgement of my offworld dress. (Save my slippers, I was naked.) They came by me into the kiosk, which fed into a local transport as well as the ten-kilometre shuttle from the spacefield. Were they coming from a work shift? Were they going to one? To arrive on a world at dawn, despite GI’s preliminary scatter of information, is to read the whole roster of signs you are used to for morning over the expanse of what you see, and at the same time see those meanings start to transpare as one begins to see the possibilities – a world of possibilities – clear behind them.

  To leave one spot on a world at dawn when your destination is another spot on that same world is to be assured coherent passage ahead into day or back into night. The aerial city of Datchog consists of fifty-five giant condenapts hung between towering pylons rising six hundred metres above the mist-filled canyons. The inhabitants still talk of the collapse of ’37, when one of the huge structures tore loose from its moorings to fall against furze-blotched rock, killing more than a hundred-fifty thousand. At such heights, dawn arrives before it does on the misty crags below. I waited on the great mirrored terraces for my flyer, an inverted image foot to foot with me, where, on another surface, I would have merely stood at the base of some elongated right shadow. From time to time I would go to the rail and gaze down at the shadow-pearled rocks which had not yet vaulted into day, till vertigo drove me away and I retreated to the cushioned area on which rested those of us waiting to shuttle a fifth of a world away – to a desert cut through by a famous river of liquid galenium beneath whose shore in a room not unlike my own lived a solitary hermit-philosopher, musician, and crafter of miniature starmaps. Her work would allow me to complete this particular mission1. Travel engenders a certain anxiety, no matter what assurances overlay it. Yet in that part of the mind where signs both of anxiety and of surety lodge their conceptual referents, the coherence of the world to which travel is limited allows whatever anxiety or anticipations you have to have direction, to keep course and discourse, to be.

  But leaving a world at dawn? A job1 about to begin breaks up into little jobs2, which, as they are finished, cohere into a job1 completed. My green-windowed conveyor lurched through sub-city caverns along old tracks. Outside the purple light strips set into the wet rock suddenly glowed a soft, vivid red, lighting the backs of my knuckles where I held the support bar – the sign, on that part of the world, for morning. The tattoos on my hands, which, on almost all parts of that world, one had to wear simply to maintain decorum, would dissolve and vanish with the first round of preparatory drugs I would take at the spaceport, GI had assured me back on my arrival. This job, had taken me to half a dozen spots among the most populous sectors of the planet, that only seemed one to me because of the three-quarters-standard gravity: hot desert inns with great plastic windows looking out over grey sands and up at a sky never lighter than star-pricked indigo; dry ice canyons, roofed with hundred-year-old ribbed and riveted plates, where day and night were at the whim of the controller illuminating the greater and lesser blue and yellow globes floating above; modern, freeform architectural compounds set on semi-airless rock, cassetted to look and feel and sound and smell like the blue-veined, dim, and somewhat ammonia-laden atmosphere that, apparently, the last batch of human colonists, fifty years before, had called home.

  As my conveyance turned down the dim, craggy h’Hol Karven, th
e light went from dawn red to daytime white (morning was a great deal shorter in some parts of this world than in others). As we passed the stainless steel gridwork rising over the rockface, which I had heard praised in six different geosectors of this world, I considered, still awash in morning thoughts, though the leisurely day about me had begun, my coming departure. Alone, borne in metal, plastic, and ceramic, towards the spaceport, I realized that in the brief months I had stayed here, I had made friends whose insights into my psychology had altered my life: whose sudden and affectionate advances had moved, in that society far more liberal than any I’d ever known, into a comradely sexuality that had first frightened me and then freed me to deal far more realistically with that of my own world’s rooms and runs. I had read tractati written here of a complexity to reorganize my whole view of woman’s place in an expanding universe, eaten meals of a simplicity that had made me learn things about my human tongue that, on Velm, I might never have discovered. And why do I tell you about leaving it, and not the life-changing simplicities that were the world itself? Because that morning departure, fifteen or seventeen years ago, is all, really, I can name of it. The rest is only its synopsized results. Since its cities and its people had no names (only its streets and geosectors bore labels), in a year’s time or less I could not even recall the number of that world!

  To leave one part of a world in order to visit another is to indulge in a transformation of signs, their appearances, their meanings, that, however violent, still, because of the coherence of the transformative system itself, partakes of a logic, a purely geographical order, if not the more entailed connections lent by ecological or social factors: here they do it one way, there they do it another – with no doubt as to the identity of the antecedents of both ‘its’. But to leave a world, and to leave it at dawn, thus delaying all possibility of what one might learn in a day, is to experience precisely the problematics of that identity at its most intense: to see that identity shatter, fragment, and to realize that its solidity was always an illusion, and that infinite spaces between those referential shards are more opaque to direct human apprehension than all the star-flooded vacuum. ‘To leave a world, you have to forget so much of it,’ is the truism, if not the cliché, constant among the workers of the Web, or indeed, among any other world-bounding profession1. To leave a world at dawn, however, is to know how much you can want to remember; and to realize how much, because of the cultural and conceptual grid a world casts over our experience of it, we are victims to that truth against all will, once we tear loose from it into night.

  ‘The dawn of space travel …’ Has that phrase already been loosed in these pages? (Certainly anyone familiar with any of the numerous histories of the Web will likely have encountered, somewhere or other, the equally common apothegm: The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman.’) To look at any such generalization closely, however, is to ensnare oneself in endless confusion: woman, space travel, morning – none are simple concepts; none have simple histories. And put in any combination, their complexities multiply. The dawn of space travel, for example, appears as a phrase in a number of old Earth texts dating from well before humans even reached their own moon, which makes it a bit problematic deciding just what it was supposed to refer to. Later commentators, of course, used the phrase to refer exclusively to humanity’s interplanetary ventures within its own solar system, so that dawn, in that particular metaphor, is associated with precisely that fount of Solarcentricism my alien acquaintance mentioned in the light of Aurigae. Still later commentators used it to mean the first hundred-fifty years standard of interstellar travel. At any rate, in the light of the suns of six-thousand-plus worlds, ‘dawn’ becomes (another) rather fuzzy-edged phenomenon. Add to this the extreme locality of the use of morning/dawn as a metaphor for commencement/birth, and the whole notion crumbles. Indeed, on those sections of those worlds where morning is a metaphor for beginnings, or is associated with creativity – as it is throughout the oestern half of the Fayne-Vyalou (the Fayne half) which is, on my world, my home – someone like myself is usually and quickly comfortable. Not that other meanings of other phenomena are similarly consistent, but such a metaphor is a point of contact from which consistency can be constructed. Even on those parts of those worlds where morning is traditionally a metaphor for death, termination, and destruction – such as Veyed on equatorial Pyrel, where, due to tidal forces in the magma just under the surface, the tremendous quakes that crack the grey-brown rock are almost always a morning occurrence (‘The high towers come down at dawn …’ begins a Veyedishke epic song-cycle that still makes me weep) – the simple inversion provides the logical correspondence point among the further complexities by which the culture manifests its conceptual systems. Yet when any set of signs is loosed from a world, it always surprises how much their form and significance may change. (In a sense, keeping clear the sense of the changing tastes throughout those changes is the ID’s prime job1.) Words, the Web, woman, world – all of these have their nebulous position in a cloud of shifting meanings.

  But are you ever more aware of the shifts, the displacements, the uncertainties that, together, make up what we call meanings, than you are when you are on no world, but rather half-asleep on some freighter or shuttle between them, or relaxing on some station circling above dim scimitars of dawn and evening, the bright and black alternates of day and night on the planetary disc below, while you search for some morning lost light-years away?

  Through half-conscious dozing, I became aware of 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 –

  I sat up in the dark, while restraining straps pulled gently at my knees and shoulders. My call number had rung and, only half thinking, I’d answered.

  I was wondering where I should go, but there was a faint bong: and off in the dimness, a woman looked up from her desk.

  ‘Marq Dyeth.’ She didn’t smile.

  After a moment I said: ‘Japril.’ Could I say that she was not whom I was expecting to see?

  ‘Marq,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. But our experiment didn’t work. Marta, Ynn, and I conferred, and we all agreed: it was just too dangerous. That’s why we took Rat away. She had to go, Marq. If there’d been any way to let the two of you – ’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What? What? What? What –?’ There was the length of a breath or three between each. The third cracked shrilly. And two of them were whispered so quietly my lips didn’t even brush sound. Japril waited out them all. Yet each felt as stupid in my mouth as the whole cascade of flustered interrogation would have read without pacing, dynamics, or inflection, as all I’d nearly managed to forget in my search for a forgotten morning now raged back. ‘Why –?’

  ‘You saw how your city reacted, Marq. Cultural Fugue was only … who knows how far away. You’ve seen the response from his merely leaving and returning to the place over one day.’

  ‘Japril,’ I said, with the articulation born of a despair that was too total to be experienced as such, ‘a world is a big place. And a city is a very small one –’

  ‘I’m sorry. We can’t have the two of you there,’ she said. ‘We can’t have the two of you together yet.’

  ‘What …?’ It stuttered in my mind, unanswerable.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  Which seemed the most preposterous and idiotic of questions she might have asked then. ‘I don’t feel anything – or rather, I feel as if some giant claw has come down and ripped away all feeling …’ Trickling into the wound was the little spill of language, already tuned to that surprising degree of articulation that had nothing to do with him, me. I looked at my shadowed hands. ‘I’m in a kind of shock. I suppose I’m too numb to notice particular symptoms.’ I looked up at her. ‘It’s like the switches in my head that allow the proper emotions to come through to let me function have been shorted closed or else jammed and smashed that way, so tha
t I believe I can function, yes, but without nuance or colour to what I perceive or do. From time to time I suppose women look at me and flick one tongue or another as if trying to figure out whether I’m really there or not. And I think perhaps they’re right to doubt. Japril –’ I moved suddenly forward in my restraining web.

  She jumped a little.

  ‘–you know that even for an ordinary, human, homosexual male, my sexual map is somewhat unusual. In general youth and fine features have never been particularly attractive to me. And what in most is a genital focus, in me seems to be divided between hands, genitals, certain facial features, feet –’

  ‘It was bitten nails and pockmarks, if I recall –’

  ‘Bitten nails in humans and strong claws in evelmi,’ I said. ‘Pitted human skin and a particular dark shade of evelm scales – they go together, somehow. In me. But Japril, do you know what any of that means? I mean, can you know anything about my home, my world, the universe in which I live? It’s a beautiful universe, Japril, wondrous and the more exciting because no one has written plays and poems and built sculptures to indicate the structure of desire I negotiate every day as I move about in it. It’s a universe where hands and faces are all luminous, all attractive, all open for infinite contemplation, not only the ones that are sexual and obsessive but the ones that are ordinary and even ugly, because they still belong to the categories where the possibility of the sexual lies. It’s a universe where what is built, what is written, what has been made, makes hands hold the beauty they do; and what is thought, or felt, or wondered over is marvellous because someone has clutched their hands, or held them very still, or merely moved them slightly during the thinking or feeling of it – Oh, no: don’t think I find all bitten nails attractive and all unbitten ones without interest. I have half a dozen categories within each of these groupings, now for the shape of the thumb’s first joint, now for the fullness or stubbiness of the little finger, now by width or narrowness of knuckle, now by the thickness of cuticle, among which, in my journeys from one to the other, desire – or repulsion – may surprise me at any turn. And yet the revealed line between quick and crown remains the border on one side of which, far more than the other, desire lies. But I say I have categories of hand, of nail, of finger? I have ways of categorizing whole geosectors: this one or the other on this world or that. I know on the hot area of Ice-Mond IX, where social decorum insists all women wear light, white gloves in public, the habit of nail-biting turns out to be much more pervasive in both females and males than in the Fodrath Sector of Clinamen 14, where, if you ask some woman who does indulge the habit, she will tell you, laughing, of a parent making her sit on her hands as a child whenever she raised her fingers to her mouth. You see, besides the coordinates the Web lays out for us, I have my own map of the universe, where (though I only visited it for a day) Trynid is privileged because near its northern pole all the human children have retractable metal claws grafted into their fingertips on both hands, while only twenty kilometres to the south, where the custom of enclawing has not been taken up, nearly three out of five by my count of both adults and children gnaw on their own. Oh, I speculate on causes, run through correlations – but what I’m talking about, Japril, is information, some of it logical, some of it mythical, some of it in error, and much of it, yes, no doubt merely wrong or right. But it’s information beautiful yet useless to anyone but me, or someone like me, information with an appetite at its base as all information has, yet information to confound the Web and not to be found in any of its informative archives.’