Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (2 page)

He did not think this as he pushed through the flap, where, after waiting nine hours, he was given a shower with some fifteen or twenty others in a hall set up to wash hundreds.

Three hours later he was given a shirt too loose over his shoulders and pants too tight under his crotch, both of them as usual ridiculously short for his long, long legs and arms – he was just shy of seven-feet-four; and though on that world six-foot-eight, or six-foot-ten was not unusual for a man or a woman, still all of that world’s beautiful people (and the vast majority of its famous ones) were under five-foot-five.

An hour after that, in a narrow room, he ate a meal standing elbow to elbow with a number of others it did not occur to him to count at a chest-high trough – on him, to his ribs’ bottom. They ladled up metal cups of lukewarm broth, drank, then ladled up more, drank those, ladled up still more. Some wiped where the broth ran down their chins with the backs of their sleeves. He didn’t – because they hadn’t changed who he was, and he certainly wouldn’t have otherwise.

For five hours he slept in a blue dormitory with green plastic sleeping pads fixed permanently to the floor: in better condition than those at the detention house he’d
been in three months ago, which was the last time he’d slept indoors. There the edges had been split, the stuffing soiled and lumpy. He looked at these, remembered the others, and was aware of no contrast.

For three days he was transported in a freight car through underground tunnels, during which time he was not fed at all – an oversight, apparently, from the resigned humour of the supervisor at the other end who discovered it: ‘Look, if you don’t feed the rats, they ain’t gonna scurry.’

‘It was an accident, man! Besides, I hear you can let ’em go thirty, forty days without food and they’ll still –’

‘Just do your job and feed ’em?’

For six years he laboured among the dozen porters at a polar desert research station where, at the printed orders of the computer console in the research station vestibule, he carried small machines strapped on his side to an information relay outpost fourteen kilometres away; and carried papers and tapes back to the research station in a dark yellow canvas bag with a dim picture of a lizard in brown and gold above the self-sealing flap.

At the orders of the men and women who worked there, he dollied medium-sized machines up and down from the station’s underground refrigeration crypts, where his bare feet left wet prints on the frosted metal walks, where the thrum of some machine down one of the storage corridors made a purple tubelight near the double doors flicker every time the mechanical hum suddenly speeded or slowed, and where the hanks of cable looping under the studded ceiling plates were knobbed along their length with glimmering transparent lumps called ‘ice’ – which had something to do with water, though he didn’t know what.

Once he was told to make a special trip at four-thirty in the morning out to the relay station to pick up some
readings, only the man who told him was new and pointed in the wrong direction. He knew it wasn’t right, but he thought that’s where they wanted him to go anyway. So he walked for six hours while the sky went from starless black to cloudy red in flaming streaks above the sand, brightening to orange and becoming hotter.

And hotter.

And hotter …

They found him, sitting, his feet moving a little, one, then the other, as if still trying to walk, his eyelids swollen closed, his lips dusted grey, cracked here and there, the blood in the cracks dried to black, and the black dusted grey again, his huge hand over the embossed lizard, protecting it from the sun.

They had come after the bag, of course. It had a signal-locator built in that let them find it anywhere, and it might have had some things in they needed. No one had known for sure what it contained when they’d discovered it was gone that morning.

They took him back too.

He lay on an old piece of canvas in the sunscreened rear of the transport with a wet rag in his mouth. One or the other of them took it out every few minutes and rewet it so that he could suck it.

No one ever asked him why he’d gone the wrong way – though he could have told them. After that they just said he was very stupid.

Even for a rat.

One night during his third year there, three of the porters sleeping on the sand beside him began to shiver, vomit, and make strangling noises. After four hours, while he lay awake watching, first two, a few minutes apart, then half an hour later the third, died.

The next morning the woman first in charge of the station beat him with a steel pipe:

‘You
brainless, moronic, worthless …! Why
didn’t you come in and
wake
somebody
up!
You idiotic – !’

The man second in charge pulled her away by her loose, sleeveless shirt. ‘Come on, now! Cut it out!’ (Whatever had been done to him six years ago, though it had stopped any necessity to respond to pain with expressions either of fear or defiance, did not make pain hurt any the less.) ‘They only do what you tell them. Nobody’s ever told this one anything about q-plague.’

‘Then what does he think the rest of us are all up here
studying
it for!… I know: he
doesn’t
think!’ Before her, plastic careened and swerved and rattled. ‘But seventy-six SI-units apiece those three cost me! And they actually had some skills.’ (By now he knew he’d only cost twenty-eight.) ‘Why couldn’t
he
have gotten infected! He’s been here longer than the rest. You’d think –’ Then, not thinking, she struck him again, on the knee, so that he finally fell to the mottled thermoplast flooring, one hand over his bleeding ear, the other feeling around his agonized patella.

‘Come
on
, now! Just leave him a –’

‘What I want to know is how the virus got out into the rat cage anyway. I mean nobody was supposed to –’ Then she turned, flung the pipe away – it rolled to clank the baseboard – and stalked off. The man second in charge put him back to work an hour later, where he heard three of the other men talking outside behind the station:

Did you see the way she went after that damned rat? I mean I was just up the hallway when she lit into him, man!’ (Rat was what you called someone who’d been to the Institute: man was what you called someone who hadn’t.) ‘With a steel pipe! I thought she was gonna kill him!’

‘It’s working for a woman, man. That’s all. I just never
was that comfortable working for a damned bitch.’ (Bitch, on that world, was what men called women they were extremely fond of or extremely displeased with when the woman was not there.) ‘It just isn’t right.’

‘Well, you know the boss. She’s been under a lot of pressure, right through here. And I’ve worked for worse.’

‘I know, I know. Still, it gets me, to see her go after somebody – even a rat – that way.’ Shaking their heads, they went on talking.

Their lozenges tinkled.

He took down the work gloves from the rack of gloves along the hangar door’s back and pulled them on. One fraying pressure bandage devilled the bottom of his vision along his right cheek. The other was bound just a little too tight on his left leg. He rolled orange-rimmed drum after orange-rimmed drum to stand beside the lift rail of the thirty-metre sled.

‘… as soon as a bitch gets any power, man. And with a damned rat …’

He walked back for another drum and did not think: They talk of me as though I were invisible. But as he tipped the container to its rim, he saw the woman (besides the woman who was first in charge, she was one of two others – excluding rats – on the station staff) who directed the loading. She stood about two metres from the men, a hank of strings hanging from her fist. Threaded on each were the dozens of tiny cubes about which were glyphed the loading, packing, and shipping orders for the station. She had turned her wire mask around on her head so that the intricate plastic shapes, translucent and opaque, hung by her ears.

Her naked eyes were green.

In the lined flesh about them (she was not a young woman, but she must have been handsome once, for she was not above five feet tall), he read an expression he
recognized as one that had, from time to time, before all this, fixed his own face. (Since the vestibule console had been dropping its oversized message-cubes into his hands every morning, hieroglyph on one side, a simple picture explaining it on another, and on still others the totally mysterious alphabetics, he had been learning – for they had
not
changed who he was, and he had
said
he could learn things – to read.) He could not have spoken what was written in her face now.

‘Hey, man,’ someone called to her from the corner of the sled, ‘you better check out your stacking schedule…’

What he did think was: a damned bitch … a damned rat … He watched her watch him. Slowly she reached up. Strings swung, cubes
clisked
, plastic clattered as she twisted her mask to place. She breathed out, making no sound and taking a long time doing it. Then, wrapping the hanks of string efficiently around her forearm, she turned to go after three other rats struggling with a distillation unit just inside the hangar door.

He began to roll his drum.

In his sixth year there, an important personage came to inspect the station. He noticed, and did not think about, the titters and whispers passed on station rampways and at turns in the halls. (‘I don’t care
how
tall they look! You better stop talking like that, or somebody just might start wondering about
you … !’
) The day before, the woman first in charge had suddenly resigned, and he had heard men talking in the corridors, behind purples and greens and blacks and yellows: ‘She told him she was going back south and commit herself to the rat-makers! I mean, can you imagine someone who’s reached
her
position doing
that
to themselves? She’s got to be crazy, man. I always told you she was crazy – although you have
to respect the bitch.’ And the other woman had left the station a long time ago anyway.

That night, he turned over on the ground, waking, to see the station’s back door open on a silhouette in yellow light. (Inside the station the halls were always illuminated with yellow tubelights during the hot polar winter.) A body-sheath of gold – possibly a silver that just looked gold in that mustard glow – a tall cylindrical mask, black and set with dozens of reception and projection lenses, black boots with decametre-thick soles …

He did not know, nor did he wonder, which lenses worked.

‘Well …’ The short laugh was mechanically distorted. ‘I just thought I would come out and see for myself.’

Around him on the ground lay an oval of blue, which came from one of the lenses. At one edge was the foot of the rat sleeping to his left; on his other side was the blued elbow of the rat to his right.

‘I always check with the Institute before I embark on one of these expeditions to the outer reaches. Shutting down a station like this, this far away from civilization, is never pleasant. Still, you’d be surprised what you can find in the rat cage if you look. For example, the Institute told me before I came that you – yes, you – and I share complementary predilections that might have resulted in an hour or so of pleasure for us both.’ The mechanical laugh again. ‘I’m afraid, however, I hadn’t counted on –’ The glow around him changed to red; nothing else happened ‘your looking quite like that. Your face … ! Well, I shall simply retire to my rooms. And perhaps cut my stay here short by a day or two. Sorry to have disturbed you. Go back to sleep.’ The figure in the high-soled boots retreated, tottering, behind the door and closed it.

He lay on his back, curious at the warmth flickering
low in his belly, in his thighs, a flickering which, as he recognized in it an almost forgotten arousal, ceased.

He slept. And woke with a gentle shaking of his shoulder. He blinked in the orange dawn-light. A thick sole rocked him back and forth. Above, the speaker-distorted voice said: ‘All right, up you go. Time to get up.’ The masked figure moved on to kick another rat awake, but gently – which was not the way they kicked him awake other mornings. ‘All right. Everybody up. Well, rats, what do you think of the new job you’re going to, hey?’ The figure stopped to brush sand off the shoulder of one woman porter.

‘Think …?’

The figure laughed. ‘You
can
think, you know – though they don’t encourage it in places like this.’ In the tight, metallic suit the man moved among shambling rats. The cylindrical mask revolved. Lenses retracted; lenses appeared. Then the figure paused. ‘Didn’t they tell you yesterday that all of you had been sold?’

One rat said. ‘No. They didn’t tell us.’

The cylindrical mask revolved again. ‘I hate it when they treat rats that way. It isn’t necessary. They could have told you. I hate it.’ A light behind one lens changed from deep red to green, but under the streaked sky it wasn’t that noticeable. ‘Well you
have
been sold, the lot of you. Most of you are going north again.’

It was another underground station with sandstone walls up to the wire mesh below the ceiling. The masked figure was with them.

He stared at the lensed headmask, unblinking – not feeling any of last night’s lust but remembering it, wondering if it would come again. The creature behind the lenses didn’t seem to notice at all – until the car roared up.

‘Okay, inside you go. Inside!’ and the little hand
reached way up to give him a friendly push on the shoulder. ‘Sorry, rat …’ Then the door of the transport shut behind him and he was in the dark with the others. (There should have been some lights. But they probably weren’t working.) He nearly fell when the car moved.

Many hours later, they shot from darkness to pale, blinding blue. With his eyes squinched against the glare, forcing them open, closing them, then forcing them open again, he realized that the curved roof and the upper half of the walls as well as large parts of the floor were transparent.

Between the rings that, every few seconds, flashed back around the hurtling car, he saw cloud and, way below, rock. Here and there, something flickered as though the stones were afire. Hundreds of metres or hundreds of kilometres ahead a mountain wall drew closer, darkening.