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

We went fire-riding at the Onyx Playgrounds, at least I did. The pet crouched under the cushions and snarled whenever a particularly bright sweep of flame whooshed by. Other fire-boats, gaudy and gold, leaped past in a spatter of sparks. I noticed two Older People, a male and a female, dressed to match in acid green, sitting in one holding hands and giggling like a couple of Jang. They got me down, somehow, and then they intrigued me, they looked so pleased with themselves. When they pressed their control for down, I followed them. We landed, and I tucked the pet, struggling and obstreperous, under one arm and tracked the couple between the fun booths and the fountains. Jang are always following people around, according to the Committee essays on Jang behavior. I’d never made much of a habit of it, but at least, if they turned around and saw me now, they wouldn’t throw a fit or anything.

They were tireless and absolutely boring in what they wanted to do. They kept stopping to catch fire, or crawl down the purple throats of great big furry snakes from Four BAA, and buying the most nauseous playground food you could think of and gobbling away at it.

Eventually they sat down in the middle of some non-wet, rainbow-colored and flower-scented fountains, and started twittering to each other. I’d stationed myself quietly a little way off, but the pet took this opportunity to blow its mind and went crashing over to them, kicking water around with its great big, fluffy, silly feet. I dashed after to catch it before it bit into their sugar thistledown-on-gold wands, or satisfied its bodily functions on their nice green boots or something. But everybody had made a hit somehow.

“What a charming animal,” they told me. Oh well, I could see they were prepared to go along with everything tonight.

The pet turned around and tried to bite me, just to show it knew who its friends really were.

“What a lovely body, my dear,” they congratulated me as I cavorted around, trying to avoid the pet’s teeth. “Let’s hope our girl,” the female added, “will have such good taste when she becomes one of the Jang,” and they both giggled.

Oh, I got it.

“You’re makers?” I asked pityingly, because they were sitting there quite breathless with wanting me to ask.

“Oh yes. Just,” they explained.

“This afternoon,” the female said, “Rul gave his half of the child. We watched the two halves being mated. Oh!” She patted Rul’s matching arm.

“Which of you is going to be the guardian?” I inquired. Only one maker has to accept legal custody of the child through its growing years and the time at hypno-school. After that it becomes Jang and a free agent anyway. These two disconcerted me, though, by saying:

“We thought we’d both stay together, at least until it becomes Jang.”

“My makers did that,” I said. I suddenly felt a sort of cold hollowness somewhere. “They split up a couple of units ago.” And their faces fell. I was rather ashamed of myself. “They were both predominantly male though,” I said to cheer them, “that’s why.” And cheered they were. Well, she was obviously predominantly female, at any rate. Too predominately female I should think, to be frank.

I said I must dash off and have ecstasy now, and everybody looked approving, except the thalldrap pet, who beseeched them with its eyes, seeming to say: “Once we’re alone together, she’ll beat me unmercifully.” I got its scruff, dragged it off them, and stalked away across the park.

“You let me down,” I accused it. It laughed. Truly, I’m certain it did. My bee fell on my head in front of a great big crowd water-skating.

“I wish you could answer me,” I snapped at the pet. “Then we could have a real dalika, and make it up afterward and feel better.”

And that was how I first thought of the child. Something to have a row with. It’s a dreadful admission I suppose, but there you are.

The pet went bounding away to play star-ball with some pale-haired Jang in the middle distance; I sat on an ornamental stone thing with rubies frozen in it, and the thoughts came creeping up on me.

A child. I, too, would make a child. The male involved was unimportant; he need have nothing further to do with the enterprise beyond providing the other half to mine. I would be the guardian. I would watch the flower grow in its crystallize twilight, take it home and tend it, send it out each period to hypno-school and receive it home again each mid-period, glorying in its accomplishments. I could discuss its problems with it. I would stimulate its interests and desires. I would help to make a person, a baby, a Jang, an adult. I throbbed with obscure but passionate love for my yet unmade, unrealized second self.

2

“I know exactly what you’re going to say,” I told my poor old Q-R with the water carpet.

“Indeed.”

“Oh yes. You’re going to say: ‘We have come up against the original problem. You are Jang, and you are too young, and you must go on being Jang and too young for another quarter rorl.’ However, I’ve looked it up in the flash records at the History Museum, and it’s happened before.”

“Perhaps you would tell me what happened before,” my Q-R suggested.

“Jang becoming makers.”

“I see,” said the Q-R. “You want to become a maker.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And who is the other maker?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“My dear young lady,” said the Q-R, “it may not have told you in the flash records, but when members of the Jang have been granted permission to become makers, it has always been when a young male and female have formed a particularly strong attachment and wish to cement their closeness with a child.”

I was all mental agility this morning, though.

“All right,” I said, “I’ll admit there’s a special male I have in mind, but he’s in Sense