Read Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand for Free Online

population belt there’re lots of computer-generated data broadcasts all over the place. Some of the sorting and decoding is a little difficult, but with some of the standard encyclopedic programs and … it’s for you, you see? Do you understand why?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Well, I suppose I don’t, either, really. But some people think that the only thing you lose at the RAT Institute is information – not just facts and figures, but information on how to process the information you have, how to deal with the new information that comes in. And if you can replace or supplement …’
    She stopped again.
    She looked at him a while.
    Then, without talking, she drove some more, like someone who’d been telling a very complicated story about themselves only to find, in the middle, they did not believe it either.
    Hours later, she said:
    ‘When I was a kid, my family co-op broke up, and I got shipped off to a platechtonic study group in the north – because none of the adults really wanted to take all those seven- and eight-year-olds with them. I’ve read that
most
worlds where humans live today are basically deserts, of one sort or another, like ours. Wet worlds are rare, and us human beings are supposed to have come from a world that was largely water. That’s why – at least I used to think so when I was nine – it seemed the most colossal waste to live in the middle of a huge industrial Tinkertoy where every day I offered my minuscule help to the basic project which was pumping millions and millions of gallons down into the fault lines in order to hydraulically relieve the pressures that built up and caused those catastrophic monthly earthquakes the northern mountains were so famous for back in the days of the first colonists. I mean, though we’d just about stopped the earthquakes, nobody
lived
there. Anyway, at night I used to ride out on a sand-scooter from the compound into the desert – a very different kind of desert from here, with purplish rocks all over it, and little scratches on them that for a while made the geologists believe there might have been life on this world before we humans got here. In the north, sometimes you get breaks in the second-layer cloud level; and when it happens at night, you can look up and actually see stars – other suns, where you know, with some of them, other worlds are circling, where other humans, and maybe even aliens, are living in entirelydifferent ways, in entirely different cultures. I would park my scooter in the dark, climb up in the headlight glare on to some slanted rock, lie down on my back, and gaze at a star. Even with the platechtonics station relieving the pressure by pumping all that water, you still got little rumbles and quivers every few hours or so. Sometimes, I’d feel one underneath me while I lay there in the night, and I would think: suppose the platechtonics station just broke down, and there was a pressure build-up along some major fault line, and suddenly we had one of those giant earthquakes we used to scare each other with, telling stories about when I was a child at the equator – an incredible earthquake, where the whole skin of the northern desert was cracked up and hurled into the sky, and me, lying on my rock, I’d be hurled up with it. And suppose I was thrown so hard I went up into the night, all the way to one of those stars, one of those other, better, different worlds …At nine, I thought they all must be better than this one. I really used to want it to happen, in some kind of vague and awful way. And I also used to wonder, lying there, searching for holes in the night-time clouds, if there was anything that I, nine years old and alone in all that desert, could think or do that, without an earthquake, would actually
reach
one of those other worlds and change it, affect it in some way so that everyone on it would look up and realize that a world away something as important as a great poem had been written or a new technological