Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘Mmmm,’ Japril said. ‘I wouldn’t doubt it.’

  ‘My universe, Japril, is marked by the tips of claws and fingers at every point, touched by them everywhere, you might say – and could only say it of mine, but not, at least in the same way, of some handful of worlds where breasts or buttocks or baskets were the marked monuments to lust. Fingertips organize my movement through any crowd, become points of frustration when, say, a thumb is hidden in a fist by a passing human or a claw is submerged in a foot-trough the moment I happen to glance over at an evelm, where a chin was turned out of the light, or shadows lay too thickly over some great woman lumbering by on all sixes. Hands and claws told for me endless stories of the origins and labours of the women who bear them; but more important, they made tales unnecessary because each could inscribe its own present lyric by any one of a myriad gestures made before me. Oh yes, beauty passed me going up on any number of lifts, as I was going down; yes, I wondered why I could not know the bearers of them all. But everyone I knew, everyone I know, even you, Japril, I could identify if, say, I only saw a finger. A small universe to live in? Oh, no! It extended between stars and other worlds, wherever there were humans and a good many aliens besides. It’s a rare universe, Japril, a rich universe, an extraordinarily generous universe in its pleasures and sadnesses and passing ecstasies to dazzle; and a walk down any human or evelm street was as wonderful as a trip to the night’s rim and back – walks and trips that have now lined how many light-years with as much pleasure as I had learned to read in the running of my own city. I used to think, Japril, that were I ever to excrete some text on my life the way, say, my seven-times great-grandmother did in her memoirs – oh, nothing so diffuse, I hope – still, the pleasure, the joy, the value for others would be the revelation of all my world’s marvels and corners and hues of horn and chitin, all that make it private, rich, terrible, and familiar –’

  ‘Sounds obsessive,’ Japril said. ‘How did you ever manage to get any work done?’

  ‘The question for me, Japril,’ I said, ‘is how any of the rest of you ever found energy to work in your grey, grey universe. But I suppose your universe is finally no greyer than mine, controlled and mapped by whatever gives it reasonable form to you. Perhaps the greatest generosity of my universe is that in so much it’s congruent with the worlds of others, which I suppose is finally just one with the generosity of my evelm parents, who thought my unique position among humans quite charming and were proud of it, and my human parents, who from time to time worried if, as distinct from more usually sexually oriented males, gay or straight, I might not encounter some social difficulty, say, of the same sort as I might have had in some societies had I been a nail-biter myself. But both spoke, both agreed on who I was, that I was a ripple that shored their stream, so that their universe, with all its idiosyncratic wonder, unique to my eyes, has still, always, seemed a part of mine – at least it was until you thrust him into my world – this male who, by all rights, should not even be alive; who, as far as I can tell, is hardly prepared to live, but whose knuckles and nails and mouth and knees and jaw and genitals and the ridges of his shoulders, the horn of his foot, the hollow above his clavicle, the width of his thumb, and the ligament lining behind his knee, and a certain roughness to his voice resolve all the dispersed yearnings that have mauled me, happy, through my universe – so pleased at its variety of satisfactions and fruitful distress – within the integrity of a single body.

  ‘And now you’ve taken him away …’ I took a breath. ‘Desire isn’t appeased by its object, Japril, only irritated into something more than desire that can join with the stars to inform the chaotic heavens with sense. To remove the agent of such astonishment after it’s been dropped, like some heavy, hot isotope into an already smouldering and ancient pile …? What you’ve done is strike all amazement and logic from the set, Japril! You’ve stolen – you’ve practically destroyed – my home. The soiled hand of a working woman, whether it ends in evelm horn or human, means nothing now. Reticulations of scale or pit? Fingers can’t point to anything any more. And without such indications – oh, I still walk where I walked, look where I looked, but where I saw what once seemed wonderful, I see so little now – I feel so little. And the little I feel mocks all I know there is to be felt. I’ll masturbate, and not enjoy it. I’ll couple in the runs and feel no pleasure and, even less, no community when this one whispers, “Thank you”, or that one presses my arm afterwards with some gesture habit has made me read as caring. And as for individual sexual relations, they are inconceivable. You see –’

  She looked startled again; and I’d felt my voice tense.

  ‘You’ve blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviours that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It’s as though I cannot even remember what I once desired! All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself – and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely mystified – at least that’s what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart, Japril. In a single gesture you’ve turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you’ve shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don’t have it.’

  ‘It’s a silly thing to say, I know,’ Japril said, nervously. ‘But you love Rat Korga, don’t you? And Rat loves –’

  ‘Love …?’

  She blinked.

  ‘A silly thing? To say? Japril, it’s idiotic! I was only with him for the single turn of a world between its suns – a third of which time I slept. And in the time I was awake, I wasn’t in any state near level-headed or responsible enough to negotiate the rapids of desire at the confluence level of love. In love? How could I know? But given the situation, is it so much to have wanted time enough to find out?’

  ‘It wasn’t so much. But sometimes what’s little in local terms overwhelms in the larger view – ’ Suddenly she reached over to slip something out of one of her sleeve pockets – was it a small gold bar, with knobs at both ends?

  ‘Japril – ’ I took another breath, and realized that my chest hurt in the straps around me. ‘What, what, what do you want from me? What now –?’

  ‘I wanted to – to see you. To talk to you. But – I’m sorry, Marq.’ She stood up from her desk. ‘Good morning.’

  And she – and the desk – vanished, leaving me in the confused dimness of my harness, my drugs, my ignorance. Where, among all the six thousand and their many moons, might she have been that she could end our interview with, ‘Good morning’? A good morning? A bad morning? A morning whose badness is organized by everyone’s expectations of good? A night without edges or end, where one can only throw memory back on to the round, simple surfaces of worlds, whose meagre rotations create the temporal interruptions, morning and night, to which we fix the cyclic expectations of renewal, commencement, ending, beginning.

  Good morning?

  Nowhere, I suppose, does the metaphor crumble as spectacularly as it does on Klyvos, about which I had heard for several years before a job1 took me there. Klyvos keeps a single face towards its sun and is therefore surrounded by an unmoving band of half-light: really, whether you call it dawn or evening, you still distort the part it plays in this world’s conceptual pattern. In that unchanging shadow-band, storms constantly crash and flicker over uneven orange hills at the equator, or over black fissured ice-fields in the north, or along green glaciers to the south. Its dozen native races, though none has ever reached true technological competency, would tr
avel there, nevertheless, from both night side and day side, now to conduct violent intertribal rituals, now to hold genocidal intratribal war. Klyvos is a world of thousands on thousands of sub-language groups, mostly native, but – now humans have been there for three hundred years – many human ones as well. Almost all, however, contain some cognate of ‘chyani’, which is their oldest root for that eternal circle of morning. And in one culture after another, it serves as a metaphor for chaos, for violence leading to no end, for Cultural Fugue itself – not so much destruction ending in death, but rather the perpetual and unremitting destruction of both nature and intelligence run wild and without focus, where anything so trivial and natural as either death or birth is irrelevant.

  To turn from the Klyvotic dawn – immobile, divisive, chaotic – allows the question with which we began—‘What is morning?’ – to be asked with a greater order of purity, if not intensity.

  And the final image I am left with – though it does not really answer the question any more than does the rest of this divagation – is from that odd hour, on a colony ship plying between stars, taking me from job1, to job1, either bringing me light-years closer to home or moving me light-years further away; I can no longer recall which:

  A bell through humming haze. A shoulder shrug, a flexed foot, the pressure of lid squeezed to lid identified for me sleep’s end. And the bell, again or for the first time, I was unsure.

  I turned in my webbing, and the ribbons, in response to chemical changes in my skin, began to fall away. Strung up in webs, each thirty-five centimetres from the next, two thousand humans hung in drugged sleep. The woman diagonal to me had her hand thrust through her net to the forearm at an odd angle.

  As I pulled myself out of mine, I took her arm and tugged it – once I’d woken up and found my own arm caught that way: my shoulder and upper arm were pained and stiff for three days.

  She turned a little in her hanging; her arm pulled back inside her net and folded itself around under her breasts.

  I floated free of my hangings to move among the sleeping colonists in the vast hangar, run through with glimmering threads of light.

  I pulled myself among the dozing passengers towards the long, bright split in the black plastic wall. I pushed through into the striped corridor.

  The bell again.

  And the orange strip-light just behind the handrail I was holding turned blue, which, on the great colonizing vessels that have, finally, taken me on over half of my assignments1, is how they signal for ‘morning’. The change in the light registered clearly enough to make me realize I was still drugged. I reached for the next handhold, unsteady either for the first time or, more likely, free enough of the quickly decomposing drugs to realize I was unsteady – and a memory of the woman’s arm I had straightened suddenly clouded. Had I really done it, or was it a half-waking dream about a ship-waking years before when my own arm had been cramped, and memory and anticipation and waking to no pain all had involved themselves to produce the waking, drugged dream?

  I pulled myself along the railing, along the corridor, curving away through weightlessness. Once I stopped for six, seven, eight breaths.

  A faint click came from a speaker plate just beyond the white plastic padding and before the black padding took up again: ‘Marq Dyeth, please continue your morning exercise circuit. Please continue, Marq Dyeth.’

  As, I pulled myself on through the blue glow, my attention would snag, now on the design patterned into the support posts on the handrail I grasped, now on the hall’s converging curves ahead, now on the movement of a muscle at the back of my own shoulder which I would feel shifting on the underside of my own skin while I reached for the next hold. Now and again any or all of these sensations appeared to contain detailed locations for all knowledge about the play of the infinite universe along whose tiny segment I hauled myself; and the dazzle of its totality threatened to halt me in fatigued wonder.

  ‘Marq Dyeth, please…’

  I hauled on. The timed drugs had released me from deep-suspension coma long enough for these bodily exercises to prepare me, after a much lighter sleep, for a proper waking. (I would depart, on a shuttle, a world away from any of the other colonists.) I was by the slit again.

  The entire circuit, I knew, was just over three hundred metres. Though individual hand-hauls had seemed to take hours, I felt as though I had completed the entire round in less than a minute.

  Exhausted, I let myself drift back through the slit, into the huge cool chamber of hanging sleepers.

  My own webbing floated near. I grabbed it, pulled myself up against it, felt the smooth ribbons against my face, grappled at them with my toes. I got one foot, kicking and kicking, inside. I felt myself slide within.

  ‘Marq Dyeth, please fold your arms around in front of you so that you do not get caught in a damaging sleep position.’

  Indeed, one hand had caught for a moment in the net. I pulled it free. As I slid it around under my other arm and under my naked male breasts, I felt myself fall away into the next stage of consciousness – although, really, I knew no more of what it was than I had of the stage before I awoke, still I knew that morning, whatever it was, was over.

  When I woke again, it would be day.

  If you've enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you'll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.

  For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy …

  For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet …

  Visit the SF Gateway.

  www.sfgateway.com

  Also By Samuel R Delany

  SF and Fantasy

  The Jewels of Aptor (1962)

  Captives of the Flame (1963) (revised and expanded as Out of the Dead City)

  The Towers of Toron (1964)

  City of a Thousand Suns (1965)

  The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)

  Empire Star (1966)

  Babel-17 (1966)

  The Einstein Intersection (1967)

  Nova (1968)

  Dhalgren (1975)

  Triton (1976)

  Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984)

  They Fly at Çiron (1993)

  Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

  Neveryóna (1983)

  Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

  The Bridge of Lost Desire (1987) (revised as Return to Nevèrÿon, 1994)

  Collections

  Aye, and Gomorrah (1993)

  Non-Fiction

  The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977, revised 2009)

  The American Shore (1978)

  Starboard Wine (1984)

  Dedication

  For

  Frank Romeo

  Samuel R Delany (1942- )

  Samuel Ray ‘Chip’ Delany, Jr was born in Harlem in 1942, and published his first novel at the age of just 20. As author, critic and academic, his influence on the modern genre has been profound and he remains one of science fiction’s most important and discussed writers. He has won the Hugo Award twice and the Nebula Award four times, including consecutive wins for Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program.

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Samuel R Delany 1984

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Samuel R Delany to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available fro
m the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 11921 5

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.