Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany Read Free Book Online Page A

(‘… stupid … stupid …’), meaningless now, yet no less insistent for its meaninglessness – an effort that made the back of his neck, his inner arms, and the rear of his knees moisten, not with the sweat of physical strain, but rather the sweat of fear – though fear, along with pain, was something he hadn’t been afraid of since the Institute … no, he did not know how long ago now. Nor did he know how he might create that information from what, as yet, he had in mind. ‘I know,’ he said, out of momentum, ‘but I can’t say.’ Though that was a response to something his mind had abandoned … long ago, it seemed.
    Long ago.
    She sat back on one knee, with her powdered hair, looking at him with a series of slightly changing frowns, some of which called up expressions he’d seen on other faces from so long ago there was no way to rememberwhat those frowns meant nor what their order might signify, though their opaque suggestion without resolution seemed marvellous and baffling.
    ‘Do you
feel
any … different?’ she asked.
    ‘I don’t know how to say,’ which sounded hugely and hopelessly inadequate (‘… stupid … stupid …’) so that he turned to some ancient feeling in him called rage that welled through his body but, because of what they had done to him, connected with nothing, breaking instead like a water jet in some city fountain, reaching its height to fall in white foam, flashing drops, grey spray, and falling, falling …
    Rage, which he could name now, had been erupting at least as long as the voices’ drumming.
    ‘Ah …’ which was more guttural than the syllabic with which it was written – the words moving through his mind were
all
attached to a bevy of written signs! ‘Radical … Anxiety …’ he whispered, and took a breath; ‘Termination …’ pronouncing the three words clearly, seeing the three supernumerary hieroglyphics that supplemented the syllabics and the alphabetics which, till now, had merely been marks on cubes that danced on the fountain’s ever-shattering tip.
    She blinked. ‘You mean that it really …? Well, I guess the transition must be kind of … difficult!’
    He watched her decide she could not comprehend what he was going through. Those were the words that her frowns, finally, had led him to. She went back to cleaning his thighs, his genitals, his shin, his ankle.
    ‘Transition,’ he repeated. ‘What is …?’
    Stupid, stupid,
stupid
, it roared, because he was asking a question. Not to know, to have to ask, was stupid, stupid, even while the new voice explained, yet again, that that was knowledge. But – and this came with words too – whatever the glove had done had not changed whohe was any more than the invisible gamma lasers had changed him years back; and for nearly fifteen years now he had been a man who was not afraid of the most astonishing and monumental inner occurrences including his incomprehensible stalling in the great desert of no occurrence at all. He asked, ‘What … is transition?’
    ‘Change,’ she answered thoughtfully (though the glove had already told him), running the plate’s edge under the inside of his foot’s ball, then the outside, then beneath his toes. ‘It means change. The change you must be going through is probably quite hard. I think your feet are beautiful.’ She brushed him off. ‘I’ve never been much of a foot fetishist, but I’ve known a few who were. Here, give me the other one.’
    He did; and gave her also, ‘I have to use the words I already have, to speak.’ He gave it because he heard silences around him in a new way now, as though voices moved and pulsed in them that wanted words. To listen to those voices and speak them was easier than remaining silent before the older, ritual drummings. ‘The new ones, like “transition”, take time to …’
    She blinked, surprised. ‘… settle?’ she offered back. ‘Settle in place?’ She stood.
    ‘Settle
wasn’t a word he’d used