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

couple like it.) So that’s what he did. After half an hour, the man in charge, who had spatters of blood all over his shoulder blades by now, looked up and noticed. ‘Okay, then,’ he said. ‘I want you to play with yourself until you come. You too –’ which was to a female rat.
    So he did.
    It felt astonishing and surprising and pleasant – the most powerful thing that had happened to him since the moment he’d said, ‘Yes,’ at Radical Anxiety Termination. When the man in charge sent him outside to go back to his sleeping pad, the female rat had not finished.
    The next day some women in plain beige face-covers got him and took him to another station where he was put on another car. Days later he got out at a station with sandstone walls, wire mesh on the ceiling.
    Among the men who came to pick up the six rats who’d been delivered, he recognized one: and after a few minutes, while he was checking them for hernias and bad teeth, the man recognized him. ‘Hey, this one was here six years ago!’ he said to his companion. ‘A real idiot!
He
couldn’t do nothing right! I think they sent us the wrong rat! The order was for rats with some experience of what we were doing up here. But I didn’t mean just any rat who’d
been
here before and couldn’t
do
anything!’
    ‘What’re you gonna do? Send him back?’
    ‘Naw. We can use him for porter work. That’s what they used him for before.’
    He worked at the polar station, which had been reopened, doing pretty much what he’d done – carrying the bag back and forth to the data station – for seven years more. Lots of things were different, at least at first. There was another man in charge. Though he didn’t know exactly what, the station was now studying something other than q-plague. Now there were several large, spidery instruments that sat out in the sand with great arms yearning towards the orange sky. And the wall behind the rat cage had been painted blue.
    For a while the rats at the station were given clean clothes each month or so. But they missed the laundry more and more frequently. One morning, when their clothes hadn’t been changed for three months, a man came out to the cage. ‘Okay, come on. Take ’em off. We’re going to go back to the old way. Naked’s better than walking around in that stuff.’ Feeding went back to once a day after that, too.
    * * *
    Coming back across the sand, by the power pylons, he saw the green transport sled and walked by its high, sand-scarred flanks into the station vestibule to lift up the lizard-embossed flap of his canvas bag and empty the elliptical spools of data tape into the receiving slot. About an hour later, someone called him and three female rats into the office of the man in charge.
    Years ago, it seemed, he’d been in the room to take out tubs of old message strings and bits of discarded packing foam. Today the walls were blue, like the back wall of the cage.
    A very tall woman sat on a cushion on the black tiled floor, one sandalled foot on the desk’s lowest shelf. Her heel had overturned a stack of multicoloured cubes. Some had fallen to the ground.
    ‘You know that what you’re asking is illegal.’
    The woman made a barking sound, becoming a laugh that would have set her lozenges shaking – only for some reason she’d taken off her mask and tossed it on the tile so that the coloured bits lay in a tangle. ‘You think a bitch like me doesn’t know that? Do you think a bitch like me would come here and ask what I’m asking of you if this station were three thousand kilometres closer to the population belt?’ She pulled her foot off the shelf. It dropped to the black, along with three bright cubes. She smiled, as if she knew that behind his plastic bits the man currently in charge smiled back. ‘What kind of bitch do you think I am?’
    ‘I think –’ The man coughed. ‘Well, really, I don’t know why I’m doing this. It’s irregular –’
    ‘I only said you should bring