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

cultures and kilometres and feelings ago? ‘I read
Sand
and
The Sands
and
Lyrikz …’
and when he’d recited a dozen more titles, she stopped him with a laugh. Sitting in the driver’s seat, she laid both hands on the thrust rod. She must have stopped the transport while he’d been crouched at the carton.
    Outside, on low, headlights lay dim orange over sand and pebbles.
    ‘What a strange view of world culture you must have!’ She leaned forward and shook her head. ‘When I was packing those, I called myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could – nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment compound I’d gotten permission to riffle had put up a whole shelf full of cubes of women writers or texts about women. She was convinced nobody could be truly educated unless they’d read them – though nobody I ever met had, except her, maybe. Anyway.’ She pressed another pedal again. Outside, headlights brightened. ‘I decided I might as well take those too, as a lark, and loaded the box up with cubes from her special shelf. I’m afraid they were the top three inches in the carton. From the titles, it sounds to me like that’s what you got stuck in!’
    ‘But…’ he began.
    She pushed the thrust bar. The transport lurched on into desert night.
    ‘But Horeb – Saya Artif –’ he said, ‘was the most famous writer … in the world.’ He added: ‘For almost thirty years,’ and felt odd making a contestatory statement about his
world
; till now it had never occurred to him he’d had one.
    ‘She may well have been,’ the woman said. ‘But that thirty years was many years ago. You can be sure: most people today haven’t even heard of her – which I suppose was my eccentric librarian friend’s point in putting thatshelf together in the first place. You say you can drive this. I want you –’ She leaned forward and punched a lot of buttons below the e-output meter – ‘to get me to these coordinates.’ She frowned. ‘Can you?’
    He leaned forward to look at the numbers that had appeared on the locale screen. ‘No …’ The coordinates were six-figured ones, and the only system he was used to from the Muct was the two-figured one for finding your way around within a city. But, certainly, it must work more or less the same way as the two-figure system. ‘Yeah.’ Coordinates were coordinates. He could figure them out. ‘I can.’
    ‘Good.’ She slipped from her seat. ‘Then I’m going to sleep, in the back.’
    He slid over on to the driver’s plush cushion and, with gloved and naked hand, took the bar.
    He drove for an hour or more and did not look back because, finally, he had not changed very
much
from who he had been before. Then – once – he did, because he was curious about where she was sleeping, and curiosity was, in itself, a curious emotion and, now, nowhere near as frightening as it had once been.
    She’d pulled out a piece of canvas and lay on it, on the plastic flooring, snoring, one canvas corner pulled over her shoulder: a bed, he thought, harder than sand.
    The town was one of those old-fashioned attempts at ecological self-sufficiency in a world with no ecology to begin with. The description was not his, but had been written by an offworld woman a hundred years ago to describe her entrance at dawn into a town more than four thousand kilometres east. Recalling it, however, made him want to look out the transport window more clearly. (It also made him want to return to the carton.) This town was five observation towers – and places where, nodoubt, a sixth and seventh, now fallen or pulled down, had stood – with forests of grey-green elephant lichen between.
    Dawn streaked green and blue behind them under a dark red sky, still awaiting day’s orange. On the locale screen, the first four mobile coordinates had closed with the stasile ones she’d punched out last night. They rolled in on a worn road walled