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

picked up … Wevin’s classical cycle of twenty-six novels, written over half that number of years, until her death by fire in the printing plant where she moulded cold type:
Scenes on the Capitals
. The opening three books, the introduction informed him, had been widely popular since their initialpublication, though the middle cycle of seven were as unread as any great works from
The Mantichorio
to
Marking/Making
. But one after another the tales inscribed themselves across his mind’s eyes, ears, hands, volume on volume. In six of them, he was surprised to find, the tragic hero or heroine ended by going to the Radical Anxiety Termination Institute; and the narrative of the third from last turned on the abduction of a young man who was illegally made a rat and then rescued by some well-meaning social workers three years later. He read Demazy’s series of tender and distanced novellas and a collection of the first three powerful novels by Horeb, who he knew now from some other introduction was a pseudonym for Saya Artif (a second cousin of Sni, though they had never met), a younger disciple of Byrne’s. Indeed, he found himself recognizing, in her stripped-down sentences with their sudden grammatical lurches (was this an analogue of what Steble had meant by agrammaticality …?), the same sentence forms that had run through
Marking/Making
. There, of course, almost wholly a-referential, in Horeb they were used to describe, with glimmering exactitude, dawn forays out from the early spaceports across the equatorial dunes, or evening fires below the awnings of the dark transport machines parked about the newly sunk foundations of the Selm Chain of urban complexes. (For almost three decades in the previous century, the introduction commented, Horeb could arguably have been ranked as the most popular writer in this world.) While he put that cube down to pick up another, he wondered if the similarity marked the success or the failure of Byrne’s experiment …
    He had just finished a six-volume set,
Classics of World Philosophy
(selections from the major works of Tondi, Fordiku, as well as the complete proceedings of theVedrik School, Seminars and Publications for the years ’82–’89), when she said: ‘I know you
can
do it at that speed now –’ (He looked up because she had touched his shoulder—) ‘but I want you to stay sane so that you can appreciate some of the things
I
want to do later.’ Her fingers moved against his neck. ‘Stand up, now. Come. Come with me.’ He stood – the pains in his knees that came with squatting over the last years still surprised him.
    Had it been days he’d squatted? Or hours?
    In the dim light she looked at him with a kind of bland approval. Suddenly her face twisted. Her full lips puckered. ‘Phttt!’ Saliva struck his cheek, the corner of his lip. At the same time she grasped his shoulders, thrust him out so that the back of his heel hit the carton. He heard cubes fall over cubes. Then she pulled him against her. ‘Yes …’ she whispered. ‘Yes, the look on his face – your shock, your shame, your humiliation, your revulsion, your astonishment … I don’t know. It does something to me. Breaks my heart, I suppose.’
    He’d felt no shock, no revulsion, only the mildest of sympathetic pains above his buttocks at the sudden standing, the slightest surprise at her action, the faintest curiosity at her motivation. Over her shoulder, he reached up to wipe his jaw with the hard heel of his hand –
    ‘Come.’ She released him, stepping back. ‘No,
don’t
wipe it off. Let it dry there. Come, come with me now.’ Holding his wrist, she led him back towards the instruments. ‘Tell me, what have you been reading at so diligently for the past three minutes?’
    ‘I …?’ Perhaps, unlike the Institute’s gamma lasers, the glove
did
change who you were. He certainly did not feel like the same person he’d been …
three
minutes ago? Years and monsters and ages and