Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (24 page)

‘The survivor was looking somewhere between Marta and me … not with any particular intensity. Still, because that face so clearly wasn’t paying attention to what Ynn was saying, it made me want to look over my shoulder to see what those eyes were seeing, even though I knew it was only blue plastifoam.

‘Ynn said: “Who are you? Tell us your name. We want to help you,” in the second most common of Rhyonon’s six languages.

‘The survivor said: “Korga the Porter … Rat …”

‘The last was a term I didn’t know, though by now I’d been programmed with four advanced courses in Rhyonon linguistic patterns – enough to locate that accent
as a pidgin version of the speech associated with the urban equatorial slums. Though just
which
slum, I couldn’t tell.

‘The survivor still didn’t look at us.

‘There was something about … the height, the roughness of the body, the stubble darkening the male jaw, the unexpectedly steady gaze of those eyes we had just given – ’

‘For a moment, Japril – ’ I laughed – ‘I thought you were going to tell me my relation to this character was that I happened to be her perfect look-alike, or perhaps among six thousand worlds’ population, we happen to have turned out genotypal twins. And male, you say. I’d just assumed –’

‘Rough, black hair,’ Japril went on, ‘sun-darkened skin … from what we know of Rhyonon’s demographics and colonizations records, chances are almost thirty per cent of the ancestry was white. The face, Marq, was uneven and pitted – ’

‘Sounds like the scars of a very rare disease called acne,’ I volunteered. ‘When I was ten, I encountered a population where it was rife. On that moon, in fact, both the males and the females considered it a mark of great distinction –’ which was not quite accurate. ‘I’ve always agreed.’

Japril’s smile said more things than I could read in it. ‘There was something about that face – though I only thought about how to express it later. Consider a mask of terra cotta. Now take a jeweller’s hammer, strike it from behind, then, before the first cracks appear on the surface, catch a picture from the front. There was that about the face, Marq. The survivor stepped forward, now, unsteadily. The disorientation we expected from fear, from displacement, from remembered terror at whatever had happened a world, two eyes, and a leg ago was just
not there. ‘Those eyes now looked at Ynn, at Marta, at me.

‘Over seven feet tall: two heads taller than me and almost as tall as Ynn; and the distinctions among those long, long muscles were different from the ones a woman’s take on in a gymnasium programme to bring out the body lines.

‘I’ve seen worlds where women’s physical labour was a prime commodity. The physicality was much more like that than such a –’

‘And I’ve seen women from labour-intensive geosectors on low technology, or unevenly dispersed technology, worlds, Japril. You make this survivor very vivid to me.’

‘Do I? To me, it was all a bit horrifying. There was a solidness, a dullness, an unresponsiveness that lay out on the ceramic flesh, still glazed with our oils, like an underfinish keeping the surface glaze from exploding. Though I knew I was watching a human, I kept trying to decide what genus, what species – ’

‘Japril,’ I said, laughing, ‘I know some Sygn priests who’d call you a blasphemer.’

‘When a world is destroyed – a whole world, Marq – there are so
many
fuzzy-edged phenomena that to speak of the event at all is to broach blasphemy. I watched, Marq. And what I sensed, Marta saw. She said something to Ynn, who glanced at me, then looked back. What can be talked of clearly, General Info can teach you in under three-tenths of a second.’ (That’s the time for neural firing throughout a cubic-third-of-a-centimetre of brain material, case you’re interested – the amount of time required to memorize with GI, say, the
Oneirokritika
by heart.) ‘The rest one must mumble about, either loudly or quietly as is one’s temperament. Marta began to make quiet mumbles – as do most spiders from any of ten worlds I can mention in her home Web-sector – punctuated with
the likes of “… severe disorientation … sociopathology … no clearly damaged …” while Ynn said in her high, sharp voice:

‘“Well, of course, Japril, after all the trauma suffered, there have to be, almost predictably, some unpredictable results. We found that slight brain damage, supposedly compensated for. But that isn’t normal neural material for a normal neural reaction to waking with no world on a strange moon. Our charge’s world has been destroyed. None of us knows that world by anything but report. The truth is, in subjective terms, we
don’t
know how strange this place is. We may be dealing with neurological or psychological upset, any combination of the two, and at any level of resolution.”

‘And Marta shook her head, whispering: “… remapping of neuronal deployment …”

‘After several hand signals, indicating hope and despair in her own religion, Ynn depressed a small pedal:

‘… and the survivor’s eyes closed.

‘The knees bent.

‘The metal floor tipped back to topple the figure into the tub, while the drains reversed to become gargling tributaries. As the body bobbed about, we went through a dozen access catalogues, had a dozen GI programs erased from our minds, and took on some thirty more between us. And we remapped the survivor.’

2.

‘For the next three days we remapped.

‘We viewed through diverse screens and measured with sundry meters each neuronal centre and margin, plumbed and monitored and analyzed the chemical context in which each synapse drowned; our computers recorded the
ionic dance along a billion nerve sheaths. Our simulators produced conglomerate vector templates in four dimensions and thirteen colours at half-a-dozen different depths of focus.

‘But it was only what GI so quaintly calls a “footnote” to an auxiliary program Marta had added almost as an afterthought that finally guided us to the answer: “Something very odd has been done, Japril – probably done a long time ago, too. What’s more, if it
is
the synapse-jamming the footnote says it is, on most worlds it’s illegal!” We gazed, regazed, reprobed, and reread among the synaptic net-patterns’ possibilities of meaning. (They unpack, like any text, not always with what has been packed into them.) Then we turned to the Web’s Basic Galactic Information map of data-deployment to see if we could locate the proper data-node that would explain the particular biotechnic operation all our researches seemed to indicate.

‘The particular method for taking the living brain and doing the kind of synapse-jamming that had apparently been done – perhaps some twenty standard years ago – to Korga the Porter, Rat, was first invented on a world in the seventy-eighth cluster some four centuries ago, and then again, in the forty-third and forty-eighth clusters simultaneously and independently (as far as we can tell) about two hundred and eighty years back – just prior to the time of Vondramach Okk, as a matter of fact.’

‘Should I say something?’

‘It’s relevant,’ said Japril. ‘You’ll see why in a moment. The information had spread slowly from its first source, hindered by law and the civil outrage that can accompany any human discovery women find destructive; it had spread quickly from the latter two sources, camouflaged by a far more liberal attitude towards research when not simply hidden in the information glut that has been the
hallmark of more recent times – the glut that is the reason, purpose, and responsibility of the Web. The three data-flows converged on the worlds of the fortieth sector some fifty years ago.

‘Such data convergences on the worlds of a single star system from so many directions frequently make an information-stable node that is very hard to control. If the information is highly destructive, frequently when the Web thinks it is under control, it simply pops up under another name in the same place – or right next door. The particular synapse-jamming procedure that we had on our hands in Korga, once we recognized it and traced its diachronic trajectory through the fortieth cluster’s general épistèmé, had proved particularly tenacious. And because Rhyonon was a world out of the main data channels that are central to the Web, not much energy had been expended on it. The synapse-jamming technique first surfaced on a moon of Rhyonon’s cousin world, Jesper, here in the Tyon-Omega system, as a medical method for dealing with certain social intractables. It was squelched by the Web as inhumane and was finally superseded, on that moon, by a programme of drug therapy that was easier, cheaper, more efficient for its purposes, and – for that particular moon – ecologically sounder.

‘It re-emerged on Rhyonon itself as a rite in a political movement that had begun gaining wide adherence several hundred years ago. Then there was a political shift – from Yellow to Grey, which may or may not have had something to do with the early conflicts between the Sygn and the Family – and immediately it resurfaced as part of the practice of an extremely violent art form: for some twenty-five years during Rhyonon’s second century many of the artists in various geosectors of Rhyonon’s southern hemisphere, when the emotional stringencies of their craft became too great, would voluntarily subject themselves to
this form of mental suicide – during which time the practice gained great social prestige.

‘The Web launches, as you probably know, a very different kind of campaign against an aesthetic institution from the sort it launches against a medical one – some say the former is no campaign at all. We try to contour an alternative aesthetic stream away from conceptualization and towards representation. Periods of high-resolution representative art, in whatever field, seem to be local phenomena on any world at all. They never last. But the swing, when we tried it on Rhyonon, was enough, according to our records, to make us think we’d won.

‘Again, you must remember that Rhyonon was, as are most of the worlds in the fortieth sector, a terribly unimportant world in the Web’s scheme of things. It was uncommitted in a conflict that had already taken over nine per cent of the six thousand two hundred worlds. It had no General Info system, and its approach to offworld information in general was unsympathetic to say the least.

‘The synapse-jamming technique came back once more, this time as a gesture of public philanthropy. The destitute of Rhyonon’s most impoverished social classes, about thirty standard years back, had apparently been allowed – by intergeosector law – government-subsidized access to this most sophisticated technique of “Radical Anxiety Termination”, as the Institute administering it was known.’

I nodded. ‘If museums are open to the public, then we must make available as well all the strategies the artist uses to contour the particular problems of her life. I’ve encountered the syndrome before.’

‘It’s not a privileged one,’ Japril said, which I just assumed was her spidery way of telling me that, in her presumably multilensed eye, some industrial diplomat’s odd datum was not privileged either. ‘So now we had a
good statistical context within which to read the signs we had been presented with. Given what we now knew of Rhyonon, her language deployment, and Korga’s accent, we had established a good statistical probability that our survivor, though found at the pole, was from the sociopathic dregs of one of Rhyonon’s equatorial slums. At some time in the past Korga had apparently been offered, by a benevolent society, a chance at what had been up till recently, on his world, the
ave atque vale
of artists and priests: the chance to have the paths in the brain though which worry forces us to grow closed over for ever and detours about those troublesome crossroads left permanently open.’

I raised my chin, which is a sign to continue in the language spoken in the west of Japril’s home world (I wondered if she remembered telling me) and, in many languages of many others, communicates negation and/or doubt.

She said: ‘The rest of the statistical range – much smaller – includes the possibilities of artist, religious thinker, philosopher, or even an industrial entrepreneur who, after having amassed a fortune but never having bothered to correct her accent (such corrections were apparently done in urban equatorial Rhyonon), suddenly opted for the Termination treatment.’

I frowned. ‘Radical Anxiety Termination … Does that have anything to do with his name, Rat …? An acronym of some sort?’

‘“The Universe is overdetermined,”’ Japril quoted. ‘About seventy-five years ago on Rhyonon, an ideographic writing system was instituted worldwide, in an attempt to clear up the confusion of some five alphabetic systems and syllabaries that had come with the various colonial groups. Since then, all official business had been conducted in ideographics. But such slang and many old
terms are best explained by one of the older scripts. The second most common language of Rhyonon as well as its seventy-five-years-now discarded alphabet are closely related to the interlingua you grew up with – though I doubt whether Rat Korga would understand the explanation.’

‘I’m not truly sure I do either. Go on, Japril.’

‘When doctors think they’ve eradicated a disease, they stop looking for it. So if the disease itself suddenly shows up again, they may not even recognize it; they may even mistake it for an entirely new one. We were lucky to have diagnosed the synapse-jamming for what it was as quickly as we did – since on Rhyonon it was not even considered pathological. But the location of the proper antidote, in such cases, can be even more difficult than diagnosis.’

‘Why
does
the Web consider the situation pathological, Japril?’

‘You must remember –’ Japril was smiling again – ‘Rhyonon had no General Information system. It’s precisely those “anxiety” channels which Radical Anxiety Termination blocks that GI uses both to process into the brain the supportive contextual information in the preconscious that allows you to make a conscious call for anything more complex than names, dates, verbatim texts, and multiplication tables; and it also uses them to erase an information program in such a way that you can still remember the parts of it you’ve actually used consciously.’

‘What you’re saying is that Rat Korga can never get all those little neurological transmitters wired into the crevices of the top five vertebrae that will hook into whatever local GI system happens to be around.’ I frowned. ‘Coming from a completely destroyed culture into something as complex as the Web, not to mention other worlds, and without the help of GI – that could be hard.’