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

History is one area that General Info is notoriously poor in imparting, I reflected, while I made a mental request from GI for any special usage information about the word ‘day’ in this particular area of Nepiy. ‘And I wouldn’t be likely to remember it for very long once I left.’
    ‘Then you’d better just accept the simplified version. The beans don’t grow; the cities starve.’
    Day
, GI informed me, while still part of most equatorial Nepiyans’ vocabulary, has become largely a literary word, due to the overlying cloud layer, and is seldom used in ordinary conversation. [Cf.
The Silent Polar Fields
, whose famous opening line, ‘Alone here, she turns under day …’ is frequently quoted over almost the entire world.] The more usual reference to time units is in periods of hours, their number usually divisible by ten, with twenty, thirty, and sixty the most frequently mentioned … There was a little mental
bleep
, which meant that the last GI program I’d summoned up hadn’t been completed yet.
    I acknowledged mentally, and learned that the original genetic designs for the bean bushes had been prepared on the north of a world called Velm – which happens to be my home, though I come from the southern reaches and have spent almost no time in the north. Diplomatically enough, I suppose, I didn’t say anything.
    My driver looked uncomfortable, but, knowing its codes, its historical complexities, she could see more on her world than I could. ‘I heard there was some similar problem about three thousand kilometres to the north, with the genetic designs for some mineral pulverizing viruses that didn’t work. I wonder if they’re connected – although those designs were put together right here on Nepiy.’
    ‘It’s possible,’ I said. ‘They could both be similar manifestations of a worldwide informational warp. Though it would take a lot of work to find out – and the fact is, it’s not likely. But I’ll make a note to report it to the Web, and they’ll at least have it on file. If they don’t already.’
    ‘A few days ago my friend was up on the moon where he heard a perfectly horrible story about –’ My driverstopped, as though it really
were
too horrible to go on with. She grunted. ‘By Okk, what a world this is …’
    We looked out the glass at our little patch of what, GI informed me, was a good hundred eighty thousand square kilometres of this one; and I smiled to hear that most familiar exclamation in this most alien environment.
    The skimkar skimmed.
    The clouds hovered.
    (Listen. Look …)
    2.
    ‘If you’re hungry,’ my employer 1 , said, ‘I’d be highly complimented if you’d eat some of me. Indeed, if there’s any of you you can spare: body hair, nail parings, excrement, dried skin …? Really, our two chemistries are very similar, notoriously complementary. One speculates that it’s the basis for the stable peace that endures between our races throughout the lowlands of this world.’
    I’d accepted such an offer when I’d first come; I would accept it again before I left – as GI prompted. But now I was told to ignore it as a phatic exchange that required no more than a nod to avoid offence. (Oh.) I nodded.
    And after a moment of blue self-collection, she went on. ‘What I would now appreciate, what you could really do for me, what I so deeply desire –’ Blue bubbles broke in my employer 1 around the vibrating translator pole –‘is for you to explain this spreading horror, this war with no sides, this disastrous ruination of the quality of life that brings pain and desperation to all women –’
    ‘–the fugue,’ the human who’d driven me said. ‘That’s what he wants to know about.’ Gathering up her veils in her gilded gloves, she reached up to rub her upper lip with gold fingertips. ‘We all want to know.’
    ‘I can tell you this.’ I took a breath. ‘Though it may seem to have aspects of Cultural Fugue to you, it’s not the big C.’
    They