Read Online Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Samuel R. Delany
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their thousands of sentences, managed to use most of the same words and grammatical constructions. He still found himself catching his breath: the scant sixty pages of the ninety-seven-year-old B’ber’s
Lyrikz
, in that tense and quiet voicing that seemingly made any object named shimmer so in his mind, were the most beautiful things he’d
ever
read! Andhe had read so much …! Another cube: he read through the classic stories of Relkor, with their astute observations of technocratic life in the Jamhed Complex and their underlying note of surreal horror. Another: he read the Metropolitan Edition of the novels of Sni Artif –
Wind
(’15),
Road
(’17),
To the Black River
(’20; in Chapter VII of which he learned, in the conversation of the tall girls and short boys who defied their teachers to indulge in long, drugged conversations behind the plastic sand-carts in the evening, that, though many people talked about it, unlike him, almost no one ever actually read the
whole
of
The Mantichorio), Sand
(’22),
Air
(’22), and
Time
(’24). Sni Artif, he learned in the afterword to the first novel (the fact then repeated in the introductions to each of the following volumes), had eventually committed suicide by burying himself in the dunes of the Nyrthside Range, before what turned out to be a futile and easily repelled attack of the Meyth in ’28. And the next cube was, oddly enough, Kysu Jerzikiz’s
The Sands
, a famous memoir written at about the same time as Artif’s
Sand
, but on the other side of the world, about the exploration of the intra-geosectral divides, during which some of the most famous technological infrasystems had been discovered, some of which, the afterword explained, had been recently disrupted because of later human development as the equatorial population belt had begun to close on itself. He read the seven-volume psychoanalytic biography of Hardine, the legal philosopher whose work had been so influential in the organization of the Vresht Federation, which, only thirty years ago, had included twelve geosectors. Towards the beginning of volume three (
Years of Noon: ’92–’01
) he learned the full story of the deep friendship between Hardine and Vro Merivon; it had been Hardine who had, after Merivon’s death in ’95, rescued the poems from Nu-7 and overseen their firstpublication. He read Okk’s incendiary odes of jealousy and ennui,
Hermione at Buthrot
, apparently written off-world, which had supplied as many allusions for B’ber as
The Mantichorio
had for Merivon. He read the complete extant work of the twenty-two-year-old prodigy Steble, her five, multicharacter dialogues, the handful of papers on algebraic agrammaticalities, the surviving fragment of her journal for the ’88–’89 concert season, and the final impassioned letters, sent from her deathbed in the disease-infested Jabahia Prison complex, to her old teacher, Seb-Voy – the same Seb-Voy who, ten years later, would go off to fight alongside Sharakik between Forb and the Hykor. He read Gorebar’s thirteen dazzling
Sketches
– and read, in the introduction to that volume for perhaps the fifth time now (somehow it had come up in the introductions to a number of other books as well), about the nine other volumes of verse Gorebar had published, all of which were completely pedestrian and without writerly value – which only made him plunge his hand down among the cubes again, in hope of finding one of those nine so that he might read them for himself.
And came up instead with Byrne’s
Marking/Making
, her three-quarter-of-a-million-word experimental novel, a cascade of names, numbers, isolate phrases, and single hieroglyphs that created a kind of hypnotic, sensual experience in itself, unrelated to anything he had read before, but which, as much as any other affect now inscribed behind the bone of his forehead, had been clearly produced
by
the reading. Blinking, he placed that cube carefully back in the carton and
Lyrikz
, in that tense and quiet voicing that seemingly made any object named shimmer so in his mind, were the most beautiful things he’d
ever
read! Andhe had read so much …! Another cube: he read through the classic stories of Relkor, with their astute observations of technocratic life in the Jamhed Complex and their underlying note of surreal horror. Another: he read the Metropolitan Edition of the novels of Sni Artif –
Wind
(’15),
Road
(’17),
To the Black River
(’20; in Chapter VII of which he learned, in the conversation of the tall girls and short boys who defied their teachers to indulge in long, drugged conversations behind the plastic sand-carts in the evening, that, though many people talked about it, unlike him, almost no one ever actually read the
whole
of
The Mantichorio), Sand
(’22),
Air
(’22), and
Time
(’24). Sni Artif, he learned in the afterword to the first novel (the fact then repeated in the introductions to each of the following volumes), had eventually committed suicide by burying himself in the dunes of the Nyrthside Range, before what turned out to be a futile and easily repelled attack of the Meyth in ’28. And the next cube was, oddly enough, Kysu Jerzikiz’s
The Sands
, a famous memoir written at about the same time as Artif’s
Sand
, but on the other side of the world, about the exploration of the intra-geosectral divides, during which some of the most famous technological infrasystems had been discovered, some of which, the afterword explained, had been recently disrupted because of later human development as the equatorial population belt had begun to close on itself. He read the seven-volume psychoanalytic biography of Hardine, the legal philosopher whose work had been so influential in the organization of the Vresht Federation, which, only thirty years ago, had included twelve geosectors. Towards the beginning of volume three (
Years of Noon: ’92–’01
) he learned the full story of the deep friendship between Hardine and Vro Merivon; it had been Hardine who had, after Merivon’s death in ’95, rescued the poems from Nu-7 and overseen their firstpublication. He read Okk’s incendiary odes of jealousy and ennui,
Hermione at Buthrot
, apparently written off-world, which had supplied as many allusions for B’ber as
The Mantichorio
had for Merivon. He read the complete extant work of the twenty-two-year-old prodigy Steble, her five, multicharacter dialogues, the handful of papers on algebraic agrammaticalities, the surviving fragment of her journal for the ’88–’89 concert season, and the final impassioned letters, sent from her deathbed in the disease-infested Jabahia Prison complex, to her old teacher, Seb-Voy – the same Seb-Voy who, ten years later, would go off to fight alongside Sharakik between Forb and the Hykor. He read Gorebar’s thirteen dazzling
Sketches
– and read, in the introduction to that volume for perhaps the fifth time now (somehow it had come up in the introductions to a number of other books as well), about the nine other volumes of verse Gorebar had published, all of which were completely pedestrian and without writerly value – which only made him plunge his hand down among the cubes again, in hope of finding one of those nine so that he might read them for himself.
And came up instead with Byrne’s
Marking/Making
, her three-quarter-of-a-million-word experimental novel, a cascade of names, numbers, isolate phrases, and single hieroglyphs that created a kind of hypnotic, sensual experience in itself, unrelated to anything he had read before, but which, as much as any other affect now inscribed behind the bone of his forehead, had been clearly produced
by
the reading. Blinking, he placed that cube carefully back in the carton and
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