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

often and not for many years. ‘… to settle,’ he said. ‘In place.’
    ‘I think I…’ she smiled – ‘understand.’ Taking up his other arm, she passed the plate down it, and down again, now over, now under, brushing away powder, now brushing her own hair.
    Powder lay in a ring on the sand about them.
    ‘What is it,’ she asked, ‘that you want to say?’
    ‘… didn’t have a father,’ he repeated, because something brought back the words he’d said before – the momentum that had impelled speech since his arrival at the Institute, if not before.
I know.
Don’t want to know.
    The doubled voice made a stutter in his mind, in the middle of which, between
know
and
want to know
, desire for knowledge bloomed and fountained and obliterated rage, to which, at the instant each question posed its interrogative tingle, the glove responded with a million tastes that, on no diet at all, he’d never known existed; he shook his head to get away from their overwhelming bitternesses and sournesses and saltinesses and sweetnesses and burnings.
    She dropped his other hand, clean as the one in the glove now. ‘What is it?’
    ‘I think,’ he said, ‘in this world it is very important not to have a father if you want … to know anything.’
    She gave him her most confused grimace. Then laughter broke through it (while his own mind began to catalogue reason after reason why his statement had been preposterous, meaningless, inaccurate, interesting, suggestive, insightful, right, wrong …); she said, ‘I think that’s very wise. Only I haven’t the faintest idea how that could have come into your head. I mean now, here. Nobody mentioned fathers to you. What are you talking about?’ But she was pleased. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Please …’ slipping the plate off her hand. ‘Please, I want you to clean me now.’ She looked back and forth between his hands. ‘I guess you put it on the … Well, no. You decide.’
    He took the plate and slipped it over his bare hand, recognizing and wondering at the approval that wrote itself from bottom to top of her face. (Moments later he realized her approval was because she most likely thought the gross currents in the plate might have interfered with the workings of the glove had he put it on the other hand; she had taken his choice as sign of the glove’ssuccess.) He felt a small surge of pleasure at her response, even as the glove informed him by a series of angular pronouncements and diagrams, slapped blindly across his mind, that she was wrong: the glove contained enough stabilizing circuits and bracing units so that it would not have been bothered by the plate’s impedance at all. The pleasure was as unconnected as the still towering rage – yet he enjoyed it even if enjoyment meant as little as the rage did.
    He reached for her shoulder with the humming plate, brushed her shoulder with his other hand – but nothing much to brush, which made her laugh. Anyway, she’d brushed every two or three passes.
    ‘You do that very well.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Almost as well as I do. And that’s nice.’
    ‘… good,’ he said. In her smile and closed eyes there had been a request (rather than a question) he could not read; and for years he had been someone who’d feared questions and answered requests.
    ‘You’re
not
the same rat I brought from the polar station!’ Suddenly she opened her eyes with a kind of delight. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
    ‘I’m the same,’ he said, and was confused because that wasn’t what she wanted, but what she wanted was not what he knew. He ran the plate’s edge beneath her left breast, then her right: she took a surprisingly large breath and closed her eyes again.
    The strap was very tight around his hand.
    The upper part bare and the bottom part in pants and sandals, her body was oddly interesting. There was a small scratch on her ribs, and he realized he was unused to seeing scars on women’s bodies. Certainly in the