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

with wire mesh to hold the lichens’ wrinkled hides back from the shoulder. He watched the delta discrepancy in the last two figures decrease.
    Above, on high trestles, great translucent plates would cast down their blue or red or green light on to the rippling vegetation later in the day. He had seen them as a child in the great city parks in which, from time to time, he’d slept. It was only a little surprising to look at them now and know, for the first time (because Seb-Voy had once explained their workings to Sharakik), what they were for – though now the light slipped under them, rather than fell through, to put copper trim on the raddled edges of the barky growths.
    Delta dropped from twelve to eleven, which meant their destination should be visible in another minute.
    Through the side window they passed a yard stacked with wrecked transports like the one he drove. Out the window across, he glimpsed an acre-wide silt-vat, through which crusted mixers spattered back and forth in the organic slush. He rolled over a stretch of road gouged about with kids’ graffiti, as were many roads in the southeastern geosectors. He had seen such things before – old transport yards, roadway graffiti – in the much larger cities in which he’d grown up; but now, because the Nu-7 poet had written a poem comparing the passion of young love to a blind child’s exploring such a junked transport lot, and because the villain of
Sand
had drowned theenraged clone-dogs in such a silt-vat, and because Fordiku, on a dawn not so different from this, when hiking out of Kingston, had stopped to talk to an adolescent girl busy cutting graffiti in the road just like the ones which, moments ago, had made the transport treads go thump, and from the encounter had begun to construct her time-and-text theory that had dominated – well, not all of world philosophy, but at least one narrow, academic strand of it for nearly a century, he saw them not as so flat and so unknown you could not even call them puzzling, but rather as historical and curious, specific and resonant.
    The delta dropped from two to one and began to roll down through point nine, point eight, point seven …
    The plaza entrance he pulled through was littered with desert slough, even this far in. Acrylic greens and yellows chipped or lapped loose from peeling advertisement statues. The transport halted on asphalt covered with large red circles, indicating parking. (At Muct, it had been small white ones, but that was in another geosector, in another part of … his world.) He sat a long time, looking out the scarred sandshield.
    A bank of mobile lichen furled and unfurled slowly below the chin of a woman’s giant head, cast from some sort of flesh-toned ceramic. Panels of coloured metal hung before her. Now and then one, turning on its cable, revealed a smile’s corner, a great nostril’s curve, an eye’s iris.
    A tall old man stood in a doorway whose metal hinges, even from here, looked loose. His naked chest was snarled with white hair. His brown head, within a circle of white, was bald. Over the next ten minutes he picked and prodded and pulled at the wires that, twisted together, made up his belt buckle, till his pants fell to his ankles. He stepped from them, looked till he found thegreen rag he must have hung on the door handle minutes before, and, trying to tie it across his face, stumbled unsteadily across the yard, to disappear among the signs.
    Minutes later, two astonishingly short men, in thick-soled wedgies, hurried across the yard, plucking at their masks’ clips behind their heads, one laughing as his came away, the other bumping one shoulder into some stay-wire supporting an old sign for soft drinks.
    The sign swayed.
    He watched the yard a long time, before he heard her turn over behind him, dragging canvas.
    He did not look.
    Canvas fell on plastic.
    She grunted.
    Then her hand fell on his shoulder. ‘We’re here,’ she said, recovering from a yawn as,