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

the machines crank on with it alone, while they had fire-of-wine and biscuits.

My Q-R must have seen me go all pale and mad. He said quickly:

“The actual designing is done by the artists themselves.”

“Prove it,” I challenged.

We rode up again and found them hard at it, and they really were, only it went something like this:

Artists’s question: “If I put a rod in at right angles on the left, will it balance?”

Red light, indicating the thing will fall down.

Artists’s question: “If I lift the rod with a second rod, twice its width, and support the two with a skeleton cube entering sideways, will it balance then?”

Yellow light, and a spool of metal paper indicating that, yes, that

might do it and (helpful advice) two skeleton cubes diametrically

opposed would ensure success.

There was also: “Look here, you robot, I can manage the eyes if you give me a hand with the cheek bones.” And: “Would your machine mix me that lovely yellow shade the sky goes at sunset? Mine’s gone pink.”

I stood there and stared at it all, and went zaradann.

“Get me some stone!” I screamed at everyone. It really bothered them. My Q-R touched my arm and I yelled even louder: “Stone, and a chisel machine! And paint! Now!”

7

Well, I was an idiot, wasn’t I?

It fell to pieces, didn’t it?

Not until I’d given it my all though, of course.

Robots trundled it up and sort of threw it at my feet, this big rough block of impossible-looking stuff. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and they were standing around gawping at me. The Q-R sat down in an artistic looking chair and appeared to be contemplating.

I took aim. There were no easy magnetized markings here, but the rush with which the chisel-tooth started nearly took my arm off. And I found I’d gone right through to the other side. Well, I mean, I’d meant to, hadn’t I? Courage! I tried another shot and this time nearly went right through the block after the chisel. I flicked my hair back and had another go, and managed to join the two chasms together with a thin swooping arc. I’d got something.

I hacked and scraped away at the thing for ages, chips flying off into the magnetized pans in the floor, and soon I was crawling about inside the cavities, drilling and bashing. It was very intricate and I liked it, and I’d stopped being conscious of eyes peering.

All at once, someone grabbed me by my hair in an agonizing vice. I swore at them vigorously, until I realized it wasn’t a someone after all. My scarlet tresses had got wound up in the stone lace. The Q-R had to come down, ever so patiently, and untie me, and after that he had to come down again and again.

“Oh, use a cutter or something,” I snapped, as I finally found myself hanging in a great big oval frame, in a sort of frenzied spider’s web of hair, with millions of stone chips buzzing around in it. My hair got shorter and shorter after this and, by the time it was lopped to the backs of my knees, I decided I’d had enough and got out before I went bald.

There were enormous scoops of gloriously colored paint ranged up around my working area, and I dipped in and out of them with gusto. I began to change color too. My hair was now several feet deep in platinum pink, and I had a viridian nose. I played with the color to create illusions, painting the shadowed recesses in luminous, vivid tones, and the prominent planes thunderous crimsons and violets, carrying a motif in an unbroken line across varying angles, and making whirlpools like fire appear and retreat across the stone.

We’d missed endless meals, my audience and I. It was well into the afternoon.

I stood back and wiped my hand across my brow, forgetting. I didn’t care anyway. I was proud. I could see it now, high in the Sun Gardens of Fourth Sector, or gracing some glassy walk beside a waterway, reflected softly in the tide. I just hadn’t noticed the tiny little cracks where the chisel-tooth had slipped slightly, the small imbalance, the way one side was somewhat heavier than the other.

I went up to it and brought my hand down on the top, a sort of pat on the head for my lovely stone pet. The minute I touched it, it made this ghastly sound and the whole lot, drooling uncemented paint, collapsed slowly and with filthy finality, inward, inward, till it was just a heap of rubble.

They dug me out.

The Q-R smiled.

“It’s always as well,” he said, “to seek the advice of the computer in these matters.”

“V ….n the computer!” I said, and, amid shocked silence, he whisked me away.

8

He was pretty nice, really. He didn’t tell me not to sit and sulk, as I sat and sulked.

We had a meal injection each, for which he paid, but I don’t think it was that chivalrous of him. Q-R’s always find that sort of thing much easier to do, since the relevant circuits are built into them. After that we fluttered around and saw hundreds of bored people being supervisors of Water-Flow, Air-Traffic control, Food-Planning, etc. All they had to do was pop buttons and turn dials, which popped and turned anyway. It began to get dark, and he said that was about it, apart from the Picture-Vision Devisory Center, and I grabbed him and said I wanted to see it, so we went. I think I only got enthusiastic on a reflex. I was going to be crawling with machinery and computers like everything else, wasn’t it?

It’s a big dome-y place, with actual picture-vision of simply enormous, gigantic figures galumping around being erotic and so on going on all over it.

Inside we went up and down softly gold-lit corridors, smoky with incense, with big metallic flames writhing around the ceiling, and saw lots of neat little