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

shut-off rooms, with solitary Devisors working away inside them. We weren’t allowed to crash in and disturb them, but you could plug in a little pickup and get a complete resumé of what was going on. And what these people were doing was actually coming out of their own minds. They used machinery for reference purposes, like making sure this particular sequence wasn’t going to clash with, or be too similar to, the one that had gone out ten splits beforehand. And they were working the controls themselves to make the images do what they wanted on a great big screen in the ceiling.

The ideas were rather monotonous, though, all dancing and twining and having love, full of flowers and floating hair. Gorgeous, but banal. A challenge.

“This is it,” I said.

“What?” the Q-R asked.

“The work I want to do,” I said. “I mean, they are actually doing it, aren’t they?”

He looked the tiniest bit troubled, but said he would try to arrange a free room for me to try it, if I liked. I liked. He went off down the corridor while I buzzed around outside the neat little offices, peering in and probably frightening people with my paint-smeared hair and green nose, which I’d temporarily forgotten.

A spiral suddenly whirled down beside me and asked me to get on, and up I went, past moving limbs and flowery torsos, into another corridor, where a gaily striped messenger showed me into my own little playground, with my own little control bank and my own little big screen.

I did actually have to ask the reference machine how everything worked, but it was very simple really. And they wanted symbolism, did they, and emotions? All right. I must admit, though, I based it a bit on Sense Distortion, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

I started with this golden haired girl walking through a sun-splashed forest of moving plants, and after a while the plants sort of became males. Only very slightly at first, but soon you could see for sure. They’re beautiful, long-limbed and really groshing, but still sort of imprisoned in the trunks of the plants they were, and you come to understand that you’re seeing them through the girl’s eyes, and she’s just imagining them to be males. Then it gets really weird. You see that while she’s looking at these plants as men, they’re looking at her as another plant, a sort of fantastic, pale-stemmed flower, her arms like long leaves, her hair a sunburst of huge golden petals, not walking anymore, just gently swaying there in the middle of them. Then they start fighting for her, first one at a time, then all at once, thrashing tendrils that become arms, and muscular leg movements that change back into writhing roots. I suppose it was a bit of a liberty, thinking this forest was so sex-starved it would go completely zaradann over one fragile-looking little flower, but there you are. Anyhow, this fight comes to an end and there’s the victor, a dark plant or a dark male with long black hair. And he moves after the girl-flower, and they go into a sort of running-away from coming-toward each other dance, and finally have love, tangled up in petals and leaves and limbs, which was strange and beautiful more than erotic, but anyway, I was pleased.

I pressed the signal button and a cage came down and took away the recorded track. I sat and waited.

I didn’t have to wait long, though.

An intercom signal screeched at me, and the three-dimensional image of some Q-R controller or other appeared a couple of feet away.

“Ah yes,” said the controller, “a very reasonable attempt, I must say. We rather enjoyed it.”

“Hurrah,” I said. I already knew.

“The trouble is, my dear,” murmured the controller quite sadly, “that there is too much story and too little eroticism. You must understand,” he went on, forestalling any possible outburst on my part, which I felt too tired to make anyway, “that picture-vision is almost entirely watched by the older groups of Four BEE. In addition, most people who watch it simply like to switch on and off when they wish, and if all our entertainments had plots, what confusion there would be, wouldn’t there?” Pause for chortle in which I did not join. “However,” he finished up, “your color sense and originality are promising. Perhaps we might have another talk about it when you’ve completed your period as Jang. Your ideas will be mellower then, more conventional, more acceptable, I’m sure. So do come back later on, if you still feel like helping our little company.”

I felt like throwing the reference machine at him, but I desisted.

My Q-R met me in the corridor.

“Don’t despair,” he said. “Have a little rest. See your friends. You were doing so well this morning.”

“Toasted angel-food,” I said, “makes me sick.” And I marched out and left him there, and went home.

PART THREE

1

In the night Hergal woke me up crashing on the Zeefahr.

One of my makers signaled me in the morning—I’m not sure which one because he’d changed, still male but another body—and asked me if I was all right.

“Oh yes, thanks. I’m fine.”

It was the last I heard of them, actually, but it was a nice thought.

Hatta had got some machine or other to write me a Jang love-poem, and the pet tore up all the silk flowers by the pool and brought them to me proudly, one by one, with a separate sneer in each orange eye.

I signaled the Picture-Vision Devisory Center and asked to have my track as a souvenir, in a bitter sort of voice that they ignored. I got the track, though, and the pet and I watched it run through over and over again, all afternoon, on the wall screen.

Night bloomed over Four BEE, and I went out walking along ancient, non-moving paths, the pet dogging my heels, playing with its shadow and mine, blackly cast from us by the big