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

both waited, breathing, bubbling.
    ‘You have a catastrophe here, a real, desperate, and life-destroying catastrophe. But it’s not Cultural Fugue. If it’s fugue at all, it’s fugue with a very small f.’ I wondered what the translator pole did with that one since this was a world where – as GI had reminded me already on several occasions – writing was only a tertiary method of text production.
    ‘How do you know?’ my employer 1 asked. ‘Can you tell, just from the feel of the sky above you, from the lowest frequencies in the thunders’ rumble?’
    ‘I can tell because the Web’s report on Information Deployment for your world is open to me through GI: there’s not one sign, but at least a hundred seventy-five, that would be visible if you were moving anywhere near a CF condition.’
    ‘The violence, the death, the anguish on our world, not only here, but many, many other places, have been immense,’ my employer 1 said.
    I said: ‘I know. And I don’t blame you for asking. But you should know this, too: in the many, many worlds I’ve visited in my capacity as an Industrial Diplomat, where there was some problem that stretched from horizon to horizon, if you talk to anyone in the middle of it, among the first things they’ll want to know is if their world has gone into Cultural Fugue.’ I smiled. ‘It’s little consolation, I know. But horizon to horizon – which is hard to remember when you’re standing on the surface – is still a very small part of a world. A whole world, that’s a big place. For a
world
to go into Cultural Fugue – for the socioeconomic pressures to reach a point of technological recomplication and perturbation where the populationcompletely destroys all life across the planetary surface – takes a
lot
of catastrophe. There are more than six thousand worlds in the Federation of Habitable Worlds. And Cultural Fugue is
very
rare.’
    ‘Forty-nine times in the last two hundred eighty years,’ the human said.
    ‘And our years are a bit longer than Old Earth Standard,’ said the alien. ‘I was up on our moon only days ago,’ she went on, ‘when I heard that a world perhaps a third of the way around the galactic rim was just destroyed. There were hardly any survivors.’
    (Look. Listen. Did you catch it? I didn’t. The reason, I suppose, is simply that I’d have thought someone in my profession 1 would have known about that already had it really happened. But there, on alien Nepiy, I’m afraid I read it as something between a glitch in the translation and mere myth or misinformation to be expected in the general anxiety among women under such pressure.)
    ‘Were they with the Family or the Sygn?’ I asked; and I’m afraid I smiled when I asked. ‘Or were they just unaligned in the Web?’
    ‘They didn’t say,’ said the alien.
    ‘They didn’t say,’ said the human.
    Which only confirmed my suspicion. And I thought, as I had so often on my own world: when women of different species say the same things, you are most aware of their distinctions.
    An hour later I was on my shuttle flight towards Free-Kantor, listening to the thrum of ion pulsers beyond green plastic walls.
    3.
    Free-Kantor? In terms of light-years, it’s not so far from my home. But that doesn’t make it notable, now.
    ‘Free-Kantor is a world in itself,’ I’ve heard spiders say.
    But it’s not a world.
    At all.
    One of thirty information nodes built as free data-transfer points about the more heavily inhabited parts of the galaxy, Free-Kantor began as three ice-and-iron asteroids herded together and locked in place by force fields (so quaintly called), webbed between with numerous tubes, girders, and strutwork scaffolds. One is some nineteen kilometres in diameter, another twenty-six, and the third nine.
    They circle a star with no planets to speak of, and though I’ve been through it a dozen times, I’ve never managed to find out its sun’s name.
    Coming into them on an ion shuttle,