Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Delany Samuel R

Author:Delany, Samuel R. [DELANY, SAMUEL R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780575119215
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

3.

I stepped off on to yellow sand, walked through a break in the lurid growth, and turned on to the variegated clay. Stone steps led up the terrace flags – the same green stone fronting most of the older manufacturing communes all around the city. Three of my siblings were playing in the pool by the rocks that turn white down near the water. Spray splattered the olive flags. Tinjo flopped Bucephalus, splosh! Bucephalus wagged her scaled tail, sheeting out metres of droplets. Small Maxa jumped up and down at the pool edge, afroth to her chest.

Tinjo saw me – or Bucephalus smelled me; Tinjo squealed and the same moment Bucephalus was out of the pool and up by the carved railing on all sixes, shaking her scaly head – Large Max swears Bu is the finest looking of all this generation’s children, human or evelm. Bu lolloped across the stones, the wet tufts on her legs dripping about her claws, the scales on her back a glister of purples and browns. She leaped against me, bronze claws hooked over my shoulder (yes, the gold-clawed apprentice in the butcher shop hails from a different continent than Bu), small tongues playing over my mouth. I opened wide, so she could be sure to taste me properly. Her eyelids signalled madly the sign we had both agreed on, when we were fifteen years younger – me sixteen and just emerging from human adolescence, she fifteen and just emerging from evelm infanthood – would be my name to her: Marq Dyeth, I read. Marq Dyeth, Marq Dyeth (I blinked back Bucephalus Dyeth for all I was worth), while with her nether tongue, the one below the three she was tasting inside my mouth with, she was saying in that slow-motion basso: ‘Marq, you’re back! Where have you been? What did you see? Tell us how many stars you’ve swallowed since I last saw you? How many worlds have you chewed up and spit out – ’ which started me laughing, since I’d only been gone three days two thousand kilometres to the oest-east. I almost bit my (and her) tongue.

Then Tinjo, all of ten years old, was shoving Bu aside and, holding my shoulders, jumped naked and wet against me. And, of course, nothing would do her but to lick my face too. ‘All right, Tinjo,’ I said. ‘From you it’s just sloppy.’

‘Well, I got your meat,’ she said. ‘And took your bags inside.’ Where she had them on her, I don’t know, since she was stark naked; but she held up her wet hand, in which were my green identidiscs that had dragged my parcels home.

‘You’re a love.’ I licked her wet hair. But she must have thought something was very funny. She began to laugh, and her face was burned darker than dragon’s urine by our white sun, all around her black eyes and watered lashes.

I pocketed my discs.

Then Small Maxa, who is an albino and will not tan – they

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