Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (7 page)

‘Part of the Free-Informationists’ platform in the upcoming election is: “To be a slave
is
to be used inefficiently.”’ She grunted. ‘Inefficiency. That’s what
they
think is wrong with slavery.’ She pushed some pedal; some gear below engaged. ‘I wish they were more of a threat. But they haven’t got a chance. I mean …’ She paused, long enough for him to decide she’d stopped talking. Then she said: ‘I mean even me. I didn’t want you here to drive. I don’t need you for porter work. And if you hadn’t put on the glove, you probably never would have said that much about yourself and I’d never have thought of using you as a driver. I want you for one illegal, very selfish – and, now that I know the kind of pervert you happen to be, very inefficient, I suppose – reason …’ In the dark, she laughed. Green shook on the underside of a breast, a nipple, her collarbone, chin, lower lip, septum. She was like a city, entered at night, created of small green lights – which was a memory from age fourteen, when he’d been running away from some place or other again, a memory that had remained as the canyon he’d shot through had remained, but which he hadn’t been relaxed enough at the time to understand because the man driving (as she drove now) had been
so
much shorter than he was.

When he was fourteen.

She said, shocking him because now he had some comprehension of shock’s sexual nature: ‘I wish you were about two and a half heads shorter. They say all bitches ever think about is sex, you know …? “Think about; and never do.” Which is what everyone else says. Well, there
is
one other thing I want you for –’ The bits of light on her changed position hugely as she yawned. ‘One other thing,’ she repeated, ‘before I let you drive for me.
Maybe this is just as inefficient. But since that damned glove works, I might as well.’ She made a gesture with her chin over her shoulder. ‘Back there I’ve got a carton of catalogue cubes from the Inter-Sector Broadcast Library.’ She laid two fingers on his gloved hand. ‘Thanks to that, you’re tuned into the compressed textual band. Do you know what that means?’

‘No.’

She snorted. ‘What are the four largest geosectors on this world?’

‘Abned, Rhyon, Cogonak.’ He paused to question why she wanted to know. ‘And Emenog …?’

She answered: ‘That’s the sort of question any bright twelve-year-old in this world – with the right education – could answer. Though he probably wouldn’t have given them in ascending order of size, the way you did, but in the order they were established –’

‘But you asked which were the biggest –’

‘Which are the four smallest?’

‘Mesetin, Hebel-E, Tinert, and –’

‘– and Eudo is
the
smallest,’ she said, while he said:’

‘– Eudo.’

She said:
‘Every
body knows Eudo’s the smallest, of course – don’t ask me why, it’s just one of those facts – but I don’t think anybody but a professional geographer could tell you the other three. You see, in terms of data at hand, right now you’re on a par with the Skahadi Library itself –’ which, when her tongue lifted for the initial sibilant, he had never heard of before but which, by the time it fell from the final vowel, he knew had been founded in ’12 in Lower Cogonak, back when it had still been officially a part of Abned, before the Severance Decision of ’80 – which was when the Yellows had won their first major electoral victory. ‘You’re in touch,’ she
explained, ‘at this point, with a good deal more information than I am. I certainly couldn’t have told you the
four
smallest. Anyway, I figured we’d put all that to some use. Like I said, the carton’s filled with catalogue cubes – about five hundred of them. They’re not there at random: they’re all texts I’ve wanted to read but never got around to. There’re more than a few in it I’ve discussed in great detail with various people, just as though I
had
read them. There’re a whole lot that I’ve read the first chapters of and have meant to read the rest for years. And there’re lots I read when I was much too young and have been intending to reread. Oh yes, and there’re about ten or fifteen I’ve read and reread a lot and just like a lot. Anyway. The instructions on the box your glove came in say that I – ordinary mortal that I am – can only absorb texts from the broadcast band at about one every ten minutes. But, as you may have figured out by now, I’m a lazy bitch. It says that if you’ve been through Radical Anxiety Termination, you can absorb them about one every point-thirty-two seconds; that’s without turning your mind into wet sand. You see, what I want to do is
talk
to somebody who’s read everything I should have read. I want to control such a man, make him lie down in the sand and lick my toes.’ She grinned in the dark. ‘The glove will give you the texts verbatim. On hot, hazy nights, I’ll let you recite choice passages to me so that I can pick and choose. I can always get them myself with the glove later. But I think this way is more useful, more interesting.’ She pushed another pedal. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Go in the back,’ she said, ‘and read a few dozen books. Then come up here, and we’ll discuss literature while I decide where to drive us tonight.’ She pushed a switch on the dashboard. A pale ceiling plate behind them put hands of light on her shoulders.

‘I … I don’t read too good.’

She smiled. ‘Yes, you do. Now.’ In the dim cabin her lips were still underlit. ‘Besides, all you have to do is read the titles. The library broadcast takes care of imprinting the text on your mind. In half a second. Go on.’

He moved from beneath the bar and stood, slowly. The transport’s shaking was mostly in his knees. Turning, he walked to the back.

The carton was obviously the open octagonal one, stuck about with packing tape. Upside down against it, flap open on to the floor, the lizard-embossed bag leaned where she’d tossed it. He squatted, knees winging either side. With his gloved hand, he held the box’s ragged rim. With his naked one, he pushed down among the dice and pulled one loose. The cubes were not smaller than most people’s fingertips; but they were smaller than his. He turned the smoky die between his great crowns with their bitten nails and read:
The Nu-7 Poems—
the collected poems and poetic fragments that a mail-routing engineer, Vro Merivon, had stored over many years in the unused Nu-7 memory bin of her communications department computer, perhaps seventy years ago now. Their wit, their bright images of wind, cloud-forms, and various structural materials for highways, all used as metaphors for certain highly abstract mental processes, he learned about from the introduction. But the more than seven hundred poems themselves, ranging from a few lines to many, many pages, well … somehow, he realized as the cube fell back into his hard, dry palm, he had, suddenly,
read
them … !

Understood them?

Perhaps some phrases here, some few lines there. But he had read
every
word of the carefully chronologized and annotated (by Merivon’s nephew) text!

He blinked.

The cube fell from his horny palm back into the carton. He stuck his hand down inside to retrieve it, to find out what it was, indeed, he
had
read. The cube he pulled out now announced on its black faces in white hieroglyphs:
The Mantichorio
, the epic narrative whose origin had been a subject of scholarly debate since the first incomplete copy had been discovered by the second wave of colonists in an abandoned outpost on the site of modern-day Kingston-prime, left by some of the first colonial wave sixty years before (again, the thirty-thousand-word introduction): Were its great battles between the winged monsters and the children, its radioactive treasures in the sunken, red-walled caves through which rushed foaming black rivers, a fantasy of this world or a more realistic narrative surreptitiously brought here from some other? The 207 Cantos of the poem itself? (Cantos 199, 201, and half of 202 had been irretrievably lost in the early At-Man Devastations; Cantos 71, 72, and 73 only existed in the prose summaries that had survived the Censorship Acts of ’87.) What he knew, however, was that, out of the 137,000 lines of alternating heptameters and hexameters that were now an immediate part of his memory, the Nu-7 poet had consciously (or unconsciously) rewritten more than a dozen phrases from it into her own poems.

He scrabbled for another cube, hoping he’d find the first one but pulled out instead
The Sharakik Years
, a compilation of letters, documents, and diaries of people around the outlaw Ky Sharakik, who had roamed and robbed the disputed territories between the Forb Geosector and Hykor Canyon – from its description, it must have been the chasm he’d once shot through! The 260,000 words of biographical commentary that Redyh Snurb-Nollins, who’d compiled and edited the three volumes,
had interspersed among the documents, told a jaw-dropping tale of the exploits of the five-foot, white-haired, seventeen-year-old Sharakik, who’d amassed her gang of seven- and eight-foot criminals from the rejected dregs of several cloning projects that had been instituted in the early days by the Yellows as part of a later abandoned population push. Sharakik herself, illiterate, probably psychotic (though in the last months she had sent more than three dozen extraordinarily eloquent letters to the Ferawan Senate, which she had dictated to the second-rate poet Seb-Voy, who had recently joined the gang and who, numerous commentators still felt, was the actual author of at least some of them), had finally been captured, had been tortured, had been ultimately killed at age twenty by the Yellows’ ‘Grey Group’ – though for years afterwards a myth had persisted that she’d been torn apart by her own rebellious gang before they scattered among the new cities, a myth that had only been exploded by the researchers of Sargu-4, Redyh Snurb-Nollins’ immediate predecessor.

When he plunged his hand in again, he was looking equally for the first-rate Vro Merivon as for the second-rate Seb-Voy, but came up with
The Lyrikz
of Megel B’ber, which baffled him, because they were brief, beautiful, elegant, and more or less comprehensible, with few words or references he did not understand – because the last three tomes he’d managed to absorb (which were also the first three things he’d ever read which were not delivery instructions) had, among their thousands of sentences, managed to use most of the same words and grammatical constructions. He still found himself catching his breath: the scant sixty pages of the ninety-seven-year-old B’ber’s
Lyrikz
, in that tense and quiet voicing that seemingly made any object named shimmer so in his mind, were the most beautiful things he’d
ever
read! And
he had read so much …! Another cube: he read through the classic stories of Relkor, with their astute observations of technocratic life in the Jamhed Complex and their underlying note of surreal horror. Another: he read the Metropolitan Edition of the novels of Sni Artif –
Wind
(’15),
Road
(’17),
To the Black River
(’20; in Chapter VII of which he learned, in the conversation of the tall girls and short boys who defied their teachers to indulge in long, drugged conversations behind the plastic sand-carts in the evening, that, though many people talked about it, unlike him, almost no one ever actually read the
whole
of
The Mantichorio), Sand
(’22),
Air
(’22), and
Time
(’24). Sni Artif, he learned in the afterword to the first novel (the fact then repeated in the introductions to each of the following volumes), had eventually committed suicide by burying himself in the dunes of the Nyrthside Range, before what turned out to be a futile and easily repelled attack of the Meyth in ’28. And the next cube was, oddly enough, Kysu Jerzikiz’s
The Sands
, a famous memoir written at about the same time as Artif’s
Sand
, but on the other side of the world, about the exploration of the intra-geosectral divides, during which some of the most famous technological infrasystems had been discovered, some of which, the afterword explained, had been recently disrupted because of later human development as the equatorial population belt had begun to close on itself. He read the seven-volume psychoanalytic biography of Hardine, the legal philosopher whose work had been so influential in the organization of the Vresht Federation, which, only thirty years ago, had included twelve geosectors. Towards the beginning of volume three (
Years of Noon: ’92–’01
) he learned the full story of the deep friendship between Hardine and Vro Merivon; it had been Hardine who had, after Merivon’s death in ’95, rescued the poems from Nu-7 and overseen their first
publication. He read Okk’s incendiary odes of jealousy and ennui,
Hermione at Buthrot
, apparently written off-world, which had supplied as many allusions for B’ber as
The Mantichorio
had for Merivon. He read the complete extant work of the twenty-two-year-old prodigy Steble, her five, multicharacter dialogues, the handful of papers on algebraic agrammaticalities, the surviving fragment of her journal for the ’88–’89 concert season, and the final impassioned letters, sent from her deathbed in the disease-infested Jabahia Prison complex, to her old teacher, Seb-Voy – the same Seb-Voy who, ten years later, would go off to fight alongside Sharakik between Forb and the Hykor. He read Gorebar’s thirteen dazzling
Sketches
– and read, in the introduction to that volume for perhaps the fifth time now (somehow it had come up in the introductions to a number of other books as well), about the nine other volumes of verse Gorebar had published, all of which were completely pedestrian and without writerly value – which only made him plunge his hand down among the cubes again, in hope of finding one of those nine so that he might read them for himself.

And came up instead with Byrne’s
Marking/Making
, her three-quarter-of-a-million-word experimental novel, a cascade of names, numbers, isolate phrases, and single hieroglyphs that created a kind of hypnotic, sensual experience in itself, unrelated to anything he had read before, but which, as much as any other affect now inscribed behind the bone of his forehead, had been clearly produced
by
the reading. Blinking, he placed that cube carefully back in the carton and picked up … Wevin’s classical cycle of twenty-six novels, written over half that number of years, until her death by fire in the printing plant where she moulded cold type:
Scenes on the Capitals
. The opening three books, the introduction informed him, had been widely popular since their initial
publication, though the middle cycle of seven were as unread as any great works from
The Mantichorio
to
Marking/Making
. But one after another the tales inscribed themselves across his mind’s eyes, ears, hands, volume on volume. In six of them, he was surprised to find, the tragic hero or heroine ended by going to the Radical Anxiety Termination Institute; and the narrative of the third from last turned on the abduction of a young man who was illegally made a rat and then rescued by some well-meaning social workers three years later. He read Demazy’s series of tender and distanced novellas and a collection of the first three powerful novels by Horeb, who he knew now from some other introduction was a pseudonym for Saya Artif (a second cousin of Sni, though they had never met), a younger disciple of Byrne’s. Indeed, he found himself recognizing, in her stripped-down sentences with their sudden grammatical lurches (was this an analogue of what Steble had meant by agrammaticality …?), the same sentence forms that had run through
Marking/Making
. There, of course, almost wholly a-referential, in Horeb they were used to describe, with glimmering exactitude, dawn forays out from the early spaceports across the equatorial dunes, or evening fires below the awnings of the dark transport machines parked about the newly sunk foundations of the Selm Chain of urban complexes. (For almost three decades in the previous century, the introduction commented, Horeb could arguably have been ranked as the most popular writer in this world.) While he put that cube down to pick up another, he wondered if the similarity marked the success or the failure of Byrne’s experiment …