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

you ever asked any Jang whether they’d like to spend a few formative years doing something slightly useful?” I demanded.

“Er—” he said.

“‘New laws for new worlds.’ I believe that’s one of the Committee’s mottoes,” I galloped on.

“That is not—” he tried.

“And how do you know this generation of Jang is just like the last generation of Jang? Well? We might all be an emotional breakthrough, and you’re just sitting there ignoring it.”

He looked flustered, but not by my brilliant, oratorical logic. He looked flustered in the way you look flustered trying to explain to a desert animal that it must pee in the vacuum drift, not up the picture-vision. But then he suddenly knocked the breath out of me by asking:

“And what did you have in mind to work at?”

“Well, what is there?” I stuttered.

“Very little,” he told me, “particularly just at the moment.” He added: “You’ll be taking away the chance to work from an Older Person, who’s entitled to it,” but I ignored that. Who cared? Not him, I bet.

And then he stood up.

“I’ll take you,” he said, “on a little tour of Four BEE’s work centers. That is the usual procedure when someone has a query of this nature.”

We rolled out in a little, low-flying Committee Hall sky-boat. The wind kept thrashing my miles of scarlet hair into the Q-R’s eyes, but he was very good about it. My bee fell on his head and he was very good about that too.

We swooped into the nets of Second Sector’s Flash Center, and the way the Q-R just slammed off the controls and let us go down out of order, nearly missing the nets altogether, reminded me nostalgically of Hergal.

Inside it was bright, plastered with jeweled slogans and reports of particularly brilliant (?) occurrences, such as the latest Jang sabotage, letting in a volcanic cloud-mass over First Sector two nights ago and blotting out the stars (oh, yes, both the Q-R and I remembered that one) or one of Four BOO’s desert animals escaping from captivity in Fourth and causing “havoc and destruction.” Well, havoc possibly, I suppose. In the main hall robots came charging in and out, bearing tidings from every corner of the city, and screens relayed pictures from high vantage points complete with instant zoom-lens if anything epically frantic, like a moving street jamming for two splits, started to happen. I must say it looked very alert and alive, all of it, that is, except for the Older People, two of them, sitting watching picture-vision and occasionally popping a button or flicking a dial.

“The robots, screens, etc., do the news gathering for the flashes, as you can see. The banks of monitors here receive and sort the Committee reports and essays on social behavior. This computer relays direct from Limbo each day’s list of body changes as it is compiled, and this one sends out individual identifications at the owner’s request.” The Q-R took me around the room and gave me his little lecture.

“And how about them?” I inquired, pointing at the two oblivious workers.

“Oh,” said the Q-R, “they work the buttons which activate each flash.”

“So really, without them, the whole place collapses?” I asked.

“Well, not entirely,” the Q-R admitted. “Each button pops automatically after half a split.”

“I see,” I said.

There were one or two other wildly exciting tasks, all of which would happen automatically if forgotten, which was just as well, as you could see the two workers had just about nodded off.

“Thank you,” I said. “Where do we go next?”

Pathetic, really. I thought City Planning sounded promising. Actually what happens is this: The Committee does a survey, for instance, and finds how the air traffic going to the Adventure Palace gets in a jam near the Time and Space Monument. So the Committee draws up a report saying this is because of the queue of bird-planes waiting to drop into the Monument nets, and how about making them a special bridge to go and queue on, which will get them out of everyone else’s way. This comes through on a computer and is translated by another computer, after which the message is given to the Older Person, officially designated Planner. Swooning at his exhilarating task, he digs up an assortment of suitable machines and programs them to work out the best way the bridge should be built, of what, when, how traffic should be diverted meanwhile, etc. Then, proudly bearing the machines’ mathematics, color proposals, artistic balance directions and sign-posting arrangements in paws clammy with enthusiasm, he trundles off to another machine park, gets a robot to feed the instructions into the relevant computer, and palpitatingly watches metal apparatus go to work making the diversion bridge. And they really kid themselves they’ve made something, this lot.

“That spiral I constructed by the Thought Museum,” they modestly let drop, keeping one hot eye on the nearest computer all the time, just in case the Committee’s found a blockage in Purple Waterway, or anything similarly heart stopping.

I was, by now, prepared for the worst at the Center of Artistic Design.

It’s in pastel shades, with gigantic, almost-but-not-really-there water statues outside, and bronze trees dripping bronze foliage over you. I got tangled up and nearly strangled in my hair before the Q-R got me out. He gave me an odd look. Perhaps he thought I was going after a new body again.

And then we were inside, up a couple of flying floors, and I got excited because people were actually doing things. I remarked—well, I squawked really—on this fact.

“Ah, yes,” my Q-R said kindly, “there is room here for the personal touch.”

Then we stopped to look at an elated female bashing bits out of a huge white stone block, and I noticed that (a) she was using a machine with a sharp biting tooth on the end, and (b) that the stone was marked out pretty clearly, and that the marks magnetized the tooth. A bit farther off, the artists had got tired and were letting