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

infrasystem had been solved … poems and infrasystems, that’s what we studied at the platechtonics station when we weren’t pumping water. At nine, I didn’t even know that more than half the people in the population belt of this world probably didn’t know what a poem or an infrasystem was! Today, I wonder what all that childish night yearning did for me. Gave me grandiose ambitions, I guess.’ She laughed.‘Only not so grandiose any more. I don’t want to make another world sit up and take notice – or even this one. I just want a little pleasure and satisfaction in my own … world? Should that be the word for it? I don’t think so. Maybe if I hadn’t wanted so much as a child, I wouldn’t have wanted … well, you. Today. This way.’
    He didn’t know what a poem or an infrasystem was either, but for some reason the memory of the canyon, with its rocks and clouds he’d once shot through, returned. He tried to put both words with the memory, as he had once tried to speak properly the signs,
Radical Anxiety Termination
.
    She frowned – possibly because his lips were moving, in much the way that, years before, his feet had gone on shifting in the sand after he could no longer walk.
    She pulled the braking lever. Through the sandshield, brown and red evening reached in to colour dials and switches.
    The transport stopped shaking.
    The desert stopped moving.
    ‘Well,’ she said for more than the fifth time, ‘let’s get on with it.’
    Sliding from under the restraining bar, she pushed some small bubble-switch with a foreknuckle.
    Behind them, six metal bars fell into the floor, and the bottom of the left wall swung out an inch. Pneumatic arms on the ceiling flexed, and the wall swung up to make an awning over the sand.
    Heat slathered in over the top of his foot, flopped against his shin, slid in between his fingers spread on his knee. Then, under the awning’s shadow, sand divided as though a blade, parallel to the floor, had sliced it, as some force shield went into operation. The regulator thrummed; cool returned.
    ‘Come on,’ she said.
    He turned in the chair, not knowing where she wanted him to go.
    The wall-become-roof shaded a flat of sand scarred on three sides by the shield’s bottom.
    She walked to the cabin’s cluttered rear, tugged aside one carton, pushed another with her sandal toe, stooped over a third, and pulled out a circular plate with worn straps on one side. Slipping her fingers through, she stood and walked back to the middle of the studded floor as, plugged to some many-jawed connector on the plate’s rim, the pink cable dragged from the carton, flopping coil on coil. ‘Well, let’s get –’
    She paused. Then, with a frown more to herself than to him, she said:
    ‘… I mean, get up from your seat and go stand out on the sand there.’
    He did. It was a jump. The sand inside the shield markings was cool.
    She came to the floor’s edge, and stepped down the half metre, awkwardly, one knee stretching her frayed pants there, her other foot making a wide print, sliding where it landed.
    She walked towards him, fingering the plate.
    A coil flopped over the floor’s edge to mark the sand.
    ‘This may tickle.’ She did something with two fingers at her wrist; the plate hummed.
    He watched her pass it over his shoulder. It more than tickled. It burned – for a moment, then reduced to a faint vibration in the skin.
    On his shoulder where she’d brushed was a streak of grey-brown powder, which she beat away with her free hand, revealing clean, red-brown skin and its feathering of hair. ‘My lord! You
are
filthy!’ She moved the plate down over his arm, around it, beneath it, brushing thepowdered dirt and skin away. ‘That’s amazing. I honestly hadn’t realized you were that colour.’ Her skin was brown with little red at all.
    She rubbed the joint between his upper and lower arm, now on the blackened elbow, now on the crook where veins wriggled across the high-standing