Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Read Free

you called someone who hadn’t.) ‘With a steel pipe! I thought she was gonna kill him!’
    ‘It’s working for a woman, man. That’s all. I just neverwas that comfortable working for a damned bitch.’ (Bitch, on that world, was what men called women they were extremely fond of or extremely displeased with when the woman was not there.) ‘It just isn’t right.’
    ‘Well, you know the boss. She’s been under a lot of pressure, right through here. And I’ve worked for worse.’
    ‘I know, I know. Still, it gets me, to see her go after somebody – even a rat – that way.’ Shaking their heads, they went on talking.
    Their lozenges tinkled.
    He took down the work gloves from the rack of gloves along the hangar door’s back and pulled them on. One fraying pressure bandage devilled the bottom of his vision along his right cheek. The other was bound just a little too tight on his left leg. He rolled orange-rimmed drum after orange-rimmed drum to stand beside the lift rail of the thirty-metre sled.
    ‘… as soon as a bitch gets any power, man. And with a damned rat …’
    He walked back for another drum and did not think: They talk of me as though I were invisible. But as he tipped the container to its rim, he saw the woman (besides the woman who was first in charge, she was one of two others – excluding rats – on the station staff) who directed the loading. She stood about two metres from the men, a hank of strings hanging from her fist. Threaded on each were the dozens of tiny cubes about which were glyphed the loading, packing, and shipping orders for the station. She had turned her wire mask around on her head so that the intricate plastic shapes, translucent and opaque, hung by her ears.
    Her naked eyes were green.
    In the lined flesh about them (she was not a young woman, but she must have been handsome once, for she was not above five feet tall), he read an expression herecognized as one that had, from time to time, before all this, fixed his own face. (Since the vestibule console had been dropping its oversized message-cubes into his hands every morning, hieroglyph on one side, a simple picture explaining it on another, and on still others the totally mysterious alphabetics, he had been learning – for they had
not
changed who he was, and he had
said
he could learn things – to read.) He could not have spoken what was written in her face now.
    ‘Hey, man,’ someone called to her from the corner of the sled, ‘you better check out your stacking schedule…’
    What he did think was: a damned bitch … a damned rat … He watched her watch him. Slowly she reached up. Strings swung, cubes
clisked
, plastic clattered as she twisted her mask to place. She breathed out, making no sound and taking a long time doing it. Then, wrapping the hanks of string efficiently around her forearm, she turned to go after three other rats struggling with a distillation unit just inside the hangar door.
    He began to roll his drum.
    In his sixth year there, an important personage came to inspect the station. He noticed, and did not think about, the titters and whispers passed on station rampways and at turns in the halls. (‘I don’t care
how
tall they look! You better stop talking like that, or somebody just might start wondering about
you … !’
) The day before, the woman first in charge had suddenly resigned, and he had heard men talking in the corridors, behind purples and greens and blacks and yellows: ‘She told him she was going back south and commit herself to the rat-makers! I mean, can you imagine someone who’s reached
her
position doing
that
to themselves? She’s got to be crazy, man. I always told you she was crazy – although you haveto respect the bitch.’ And the other woman had left the station a long time ago anyway.
    That night, he turned over on the ground, waking, to see the station’s back door open on a silhouette in yellow light. (Inside the station the halls were always illuminated with