Read Online Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Samuel R. Delany
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Their wit, their bright images of wind, cloud-forms, and various structural materials for highways, all used as metaphors for certain highly abstract mental processes, he learned about from the introduction. But the more than seven hundred poems themselves, ranging from a few lines to many, many pages, well … somehow, he realized as the cube fell back into his hard, dry palm, he had, suddenly,
read
them … !
Understood them?
Perhaps some phrases here, some few lines there. But he had read
every
word of the carefully chronologized and annotated (by Merivon’s nephew) text!
He blinked.
The cube fell from his horny palm back into the carton. He stuck his hand down inside to retrieve it, to find out what it was, indeed, he
had
read. The cube he pulled out now announced on its black faces in white hieroglyphs:
The Mantichorio
, the epic narrative whose origin had been a subject of scholarly debate since the first incomplete copy had been discovered by the second wave of colonists in an abandoned outpost on the site of modern-day Kingston-prime, left by some of the first colonial wave sixty years before (again, the thirty-thousand-word introduction): Were its great battles between the winged monsters and the children, its radioactive treasures in the sunken, red-walled caves through which rushed foaming black rivers, a fantasy of this world or a more realistic narrative surreptitiously brought here from some other? The 207 Cantos of the poem itself? (Cantos 199, 201, and half of 202 had been irretrievably lost in the early At-Man Devastations; Cantos 71, 72, and 73 only existed in the prose summaries that had survived the Censorship Acts of ’87.) What he knew, however, was that, out of the 137,000 lines of alternating heptameters and hexameters that were now an immediate part of his memory, the Nu-7 poet had consciously (or unconsciously) rewritten more than a dozen phrases from it into her own poems.
He scrabbled for another cube, hoping he’d find the first one but pulled out instead
The Sharakik Years
, a compilation of letters, documents, and diaries of people around the outlaw Ky Sharakik, who had roamed and robbed the disputed territories between the Forb Geosector and Hykor Canyon – from its description, it must have been the chasm he’d once shot through! The 260,000 words of biographical commentary that Redyh Snurb-Nollins, who’d compiled and edited the three volumes,had interspersed among the documents, told a jaw-dropping tale of the exploits of the five-foot, white-haired, seventeen-year-old Sharakik, who’d amassed her gang of seven- and eight-foot criminals from the rejected dregs of several cloning projects that had been instituted in the early days by the Yellows as part of a later abandoned population push. Sharakik herself, illiterate, probably psychotic (though in the last months she had sent more than three dozen extraordinarily eloquent letters to the Ferawan Senate, which she had dictated to the second-rate poet Seb-Voy, who had recently joined the gang and who, numerous commentators still felt, was the actual author of at least some of them), had finally been captured, had been tortured, had been ultimately killed at age twenty by the Yellows’ ‘Grey Group’ – though for years afterwards a myth had persisted that she’d been torn apart by her own rebellious gang before they scattered among the new cities, a myth that had only been exploded by the researchers of Sargu-4, Redyh Snurb-Nollins’ immediate predecessor.
When he plunged his hand in again, he was looking equally for the first-rate Vro Merivon as for the second-rate Seb-Voy, but came up with
The Lyrikz
of Megel B’ber, which baffled him, because they were brief, beautiful, elegant, and more or less comprehensible, with few words or references he did not understand – because the last three tomes he’d managed to absorb (which were also the first three things he’d ever read which were not delivery instructions) had, among
read
them … !
Understood them?
Perhaps some phrases here, some few lines there. But he had read
every
word of the carefully chronologized and annotated (by Merivon’s nephew) text!
He blinked.
The cube fell from his horny palm back into the carton. He stuck his hand down inside to retrieve it, to find out what it was, indeed, he
had
read. The cube he pulled out now announced on its black faces in white hieroglyphs:
The Mantichorio
, the epic narrative whose origin had been a subject of scholarly debate since the first incomplete copy had been discovered by the second wave of colonists in an abandoned outpost on the site of modern-day Kingston-prime, left by some of the first colonial wave sixty years before (again, the thirty-thousand-word introduction): Were its great battles between the winged monsters and the children, its radioactive treasures in the sunken, red-walled caves through which rushed foaming black rivers, a fantasy of this world or a more realistic narrative surreptitiously brought here from some other? The 207 Cantos of the poem itself? (Cantos 199, 201, and half of 202 had been irretrievably lost in the early At-Man Devastations; Cantos 71, 72, and 73 only existed in the prose summaries that had survived the Censorship Acts of ’87.) What he knew, however, was that, out of the 137,000 lines of alternating heptameters and hexameters that were now an immediate part of his memory, the Nu-7 poet had consciously (or unconsciously) rewritten more than a dozen phrases from it into her own poems.
He scrabbled for another cube, hoping he’d find the first one but pulled out instead
The Sharakik Years
, a compilation of letters, documents, and diaries of people around the outlaw Ky Sharakik, who had roamed and robbed the disputed territories between the Forb Geosector and Hykor Canyon – from its description, it must have been the chasm he’d once shot through! The 260,000 words of biographical commentary that Redyh Snurb-Nollins, who’d compiled and edited the three volumes,had interspersed among the documents, told a jaw-dropping tale of the exploits of the five-foot, white-haired, seventeen-year-old Sharakik, who’d amassed her gang of seven- and eight-foot criminals from the rejected dregs of several cloning projects that had been instituted in the early days by the Yellows as part of a later abandoned population push. Sharakik herself, illiterate, probably psychotic (though in the last months she had sent more than three dozen extraordinarily eloquent letters to the Ferawan Senate, which she had dictated to the second-rate poet Seb-Voy, who had recently joined the gang and who, numerous commentators still felt, was the actual author of at least some of them), had finally been captured, had been tortured, had been ultimately killed at age twenty by the Yellows’ ‘Grey Group’ – though for years afterwards a myth had persisted that she’d been torn apart by her own rebellious gang before they scattered among the new cities, a myth that had only been exploded by the researchers of Sargu-4, Redyh Snurb-Nollins’ immediate predecessor.
When he plunged his hand in again, he was looking equally for the first-rate Vro Merivon as for the second-rate Seb-Voy, but came up with
The Lyrikz
of Megel B’ber, which baffled him, because they were brief, beautiful, elegant, and more or less comprehensible, with few words or references he did not understand – because the last three tomes he’d managed to absorb (which were also the first three things he’d ever read which were not delivery instructions) had, among
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