Don’t Bite the Sun by Tanith Lee (little red riding hood ebook free .TXT) 📕

belonging entirety to the Jang. Minor deviations do not count. If, by some error, we had applied for your changing as you suggest, it would have brought you almost immediate distress.”

“This is absurd,” I said. “I’m distressed now.”

“Of course.” He looked at me, anxious for my happiness. “I think you will find that the answer to your problem is to throw yourself more wholeheartedly into Jang pursuits. Fill your time. Stop thinking: ‘I must be joyous,’ and then hating everyone when you fail to achieve joy in this manner. Relax.”

“Thank you,” I said stiffly. “I suppose I have to pay?”

“That is entirely up to you,” the Q-R said blandly. “If you would rather not, there is no need.”

So I was spared that at least.

I went out feeling hopeless, in a sort of nightmare. I kept saying over and over to myself: They’ve done me. It’s all a big plot. None of those questions meant anything, just a sort of game to make me think they’d tried.

I got to the bubble and shut the door, and kicked my bee into relative submission. I sat down, and there was the pet in my lap. I looked at the pet, into orange jungles of eyes that had lived somewhere far out near Four BOO, among rock-thrusts and restless desert.

“They’re right,” I said, “it’s no good. I’m still Jang, and I don’t want to skip ahead at all. What’s wrong then? What is it that’s so terribly the matter with me?”

And I put my arms around the pet and my cheek in its fur; it let me stay like that for ten whole splits before it bit me.

5

Hatta signaled yet again, and I was so fed up and bewildered I actually said I’d meet him for eighth meal.

We went to Blue Sky and sat on the see-through floor, with the darkening city moving slowly under us, and tried to eat salad-on-ice without being ill from vertigo.

They had assured me at the Committee Hall that my disgraceful urge to change from being Jang would never leak out, and that my friends, therefore, would never curl up into hooting hysterics at my foolishness—I more or less quote. I kept getting an uncontrollable desire to tell Hatta, though; he always seemed so reliable and stolid. I suppose the ugliness helped. But I didn’t. I think the Committee staff had done a good job and I really was ashamed.

As we got on to the confectionery and cactus-pineapple stage, he thrust the marriage proposal at me again, and I again declined.

“I couldn’t stand it,” I said, “I feel tosky enough as it is.”

We sat and stared down at the lights lighting up, and I wondered why, if he found the need of me so pressing, he didn’t change into something attractive. I liked Hatta after all, and in a pretty body he’d be nice. Then I though, perhaps he does it deliberately to stop me from ever agreeing. Perhaps he doesn’t really want me at all, and just likes to kid himself he does. This somehow made me feel as if I’d wilted, and I said I wanted to go home.

He’s very good really. You know he’ll probably be around when you need him, and go away when you want him to.

I wandered through my lonely glassy palace, looking vaguely for the pet, who didn’t appear.

“You should throw yourself more wholeheartedly into Jang pursuits,” the Q-R had told me. Throw yourself, presumably, anywhere but at the Committee. All right, I would devise a program of adventures for tomorrow. Thousands of splits later I lost my mind or something, and went raging around, totally frustrated at my lack of enthusiasm for anything I could think of. I turned on all the picture visions and music units, and woke up the kitchen and house cleaners, and sat there in the middle of absolute chaos, pulling at strands of my hair.

I took a hypno-croon to bed with me and got it to say to me, all night long in my sleep:

“I will be constructive, I will be constructive. I will think of something wonderful to do.”

6

And I thought of something.

I actually did. I opened my eyes with it nestling in my brain.

I’d work.

Something to involve me, take up my time, something to wake up for. I wasn’t quite sure what sort of thing was going in Four BEE. One of my makers had once done a spell with the flashes, and came back home every mid-vrek refreshed to an enchanting degree.

I splashed happily in my lagoon bath, dressed as Jangily as I possibly could, just to please them all, and sped away to the Zeefahr in my bubble, thence to the Committee Hall.

I was ushered straight in to my old friend with the water carpet, who looked at me nervously.

“I’ve decided to take your advice,” I declared. “I’m enjoying being a Jang.”

“Er, good,” he answered.

“Like it?” I pirouetted, displaying all my beads and gold chains and flowers and tinsel and see-through. “And I’ve eaten the most popular Jang first meal, toasted angel-food, and bought a whole new track of Upper-Ear music—stolen it, actually,” I confided, all gay abandon. It was really wild. But my Q-R wasn’t taken in. His emotion gauges must have been standing up like quills. He smiled and said:

“And what precisely did you want, young lady?”

Smite him with my fiery wings, I thought.

“Work,” I cooed.

“I understand,” he said, and we looked at each other.

“I’m afraid,” he said a little later, “that we have come back to the original problem.”

“Oh yes?” I said, and I must have looked dangerous. His hand strayed to a summoner-button, ready to call in millions of loyal robots to rescue him if I leaped for his mustache or anything.

“You see,” he said, eyeing me, “the Committee does not employ the Jang. Your minds should be free to explore recreation and pleasure. Older People, if they wish, may render some sort of voluntary service, certainly, but in the formative years …”

“Have