Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Read Free Page B

hurtling car, he saw cloud and, way below, rock. Here and there, something flickered as though the stones were afire. Hundreds of metres or hundreds of kilometres ahead a mountain wall drew closer, darkening.
    Red and brown rocks towered about.
    Moments before the car smashed into the stone-face, he saw the hole with still another ring around it.
    Another rat in the car mumbled: ‘Another world …’
    They plunged into it: darkness.
    He’d known his world contained cities and sand. But the canyon, with its rocks and rampant clouds, made him, though he could not have said how, change his vision of what a world was.
    After the ride there was another station, another shower. The man who ushered the hundreds of rats who’d been collected here into the hangar, under water nozzles along the ceilings and walls, stopped him long enough to say, ‘Jeeze!
You
look like you ain’t been washed since you
got
to the Institute!’ (The rat cage in back of the polar station, though it had been disinfected and deodorized once a month, had not had any water for washing rats.) After the shower they were issued moreclothes. (The ones he’d been given back at the Institute had, down at the polar station, come apart, bit by bit, first at the places they’d been too tight, then all over, now a sleeve falling off, now a pants leg torn away; for the last year he and the other porters had done their work naked.) He was fed from another trough.
    Under girders and wires and behind round windows that distorted things at their edges, he worked for three weeks at the industrial yard before he associated the frequently repeated name
Muct
with the unknown hieroglyph above the doors and on the first cubes of all instruction strings and stencilled in yellow over the brown and green enamelled machines. There were seven machines from which he had to clean the soot and soiled lubricant that blackened his hands and stiffened his clothes. Unlike the polar station, here he was fed twice a day, washed every three days, and his work togs changed bi-weekly. Around him, thousands of rats serviced the great city full of machines, called Muct.
    The man in charge, of him and some thirty-two others, told him many things, now about one machine, now about another, told him the things softly, simply, clearly – told him to remember them; and what he was told to do, he did. In six months, he had learned how to drive two of the machines and how to repair four others so well that frequently he did not see the man who was in charge for three and four days at a time.
    Sometimes the man came in to where he was working, with another man who himself was being trained to be a rat trainer: ‘Now who says they can’t learn? Look at this one here, for instance. You just got to know how to teach ’em, is all. They learn better than an ordinary man. I mean, you tell them to do something, they do it. And they remember it –
if
you tell ’em to remember. You just got to know what to tell. I always say to you new guys,you tell a rat to take a shit, you gotta remember to tell ’er to pull her pants down first and then pull ’em up afterwards. Or you gonna have a rat with shitty pants.’ (Most of the rats back at the polar station and most of the rats at Muct were women.) ‘But some guys don’t have the patience. You gotta be patient with a rat. Man, I can get these damned rats to do anything a damned man can do. I can even get them to do things you wouldn’t think a damned bitch could do. Once I taught a rat to cook food for me, just as good as a man.’
    ‘Oh, I know women who can cook!’
    ‘Well, yeah. But those were exceptions,’ the trainer said. ‘And I mean, a damned rat …?’
    ‘What else did you teach her?’ The interlocutor’s lozenges tinkled.
    The man in charge, who didn’t wear a mask (like a rat himself), just grinned as they went out.
    Sometimes between work shifts the man would sneak several rats into his own quarters and tell them to do odd things.