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

off into these crazy euphorics about how wonderful the life spark was, that little, indefinable something which has to be made initially by a male and a female, no matter how many bodies it hops in and out of once it’s grown up. It still puzzles everyone, that. The Q-R scientists can’t come to terms with it, even now. They sort of go “Er, humph!” whenever anyone mentions it.

“The essential difference between the Quasi-Robot (android) and the living man,” the books have it, “lies in the fact that the Quasi-Robot is living flesh motivated by electrodes, metallic plasma, and a steel brain, built into the cells as they grow. Man is pure flesh without electronic or metallic interference, created from female and male cells, containing that ancient element once termed the Soul.”

But I was crazy with joy on the bridge, thinking of my half, lying waiting, the tiny spark from my spark, little pale ooma, my child, my self. I felt as if I were in ecstasy, but I hadn’t touched a pill for ages.

Near Limbo, I realized I hadn’t got anything to take Hergal, so I went and stole a robotic serpent with pearl plating, really insumatt, then felt mean and went all the way back to pay for it; it wouldn’t really be a present, after all, if I’d stolen it, would it?

When I got to Limbo, I had the usual trouble with everyone trying to find Hergal. I hadn’t seen the flash about his new body, and wondered what he’d be like this time. I soon found out.

“Oh Hergal!” I practically screamed. “How could you?”

“What’s wrong?” Hergal inquired, lazily uncoiling her lithe, silver body from a floating couch and jumping neatly into bounce on the crystallize-rubber floor.

“You’re female!” I stated.

“Top marks,” she sneered. Her hair was long and twilight mauve, plaited and full of jewelry. She had emeralds pasted on the nipples of her small, delectable breasts, and a groin shield of flowers.

My happiness exploded and was gone. I explained, between the dry sobs of my furious disappointment.

“Well, how was I to know?” Hergal asked me, reasonably enough. She tried to comfort me, but at the touch of her lovely soft arm I rushed out and went home. I’d forgotten to give her the snake, but the pet had fun with it, and for units after I fell and tripped and skidded over dismantled pearl plates. Symbolism again, I suppose, of my dismantled hopes.

4

Hatta signaled.

To torture myself, looking into his four pink eyes, I imagined saying: “Hatta, make a child with me.” Ugh! Just to think of it. I didn’t suppose the Committee would allow it anyway. The baby would probably grow three or four heads, and hooves or something.

“No,” I said to Hatta, not really having listened to what he was saying, but having guessed—correctly too, presumably, judging from his woebegone expression. He went away.

The pet wanted to play and I didn’t. We had a one-sided row and it bit me.

Who? That was the question. Who? Who? Who? I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to give their half to my child. Besides, everyone seemed to be being female all over the place. Even Kley.

And then I thought of the sand-ships, one every twelve units, out of Four BEE, across the Burning Desert, etc., into Four BOO and Four BAA. Perhaps some handsome body with a handsome life spark inside it was waiting to be useful there. Oh joy!

“Want to come?” I asked the pet doubtfully.

I knew it would insist on coming, and bite everybody all the time, and go zaradann at the worst possible moments. It followed me to the porch, honking softly.

“Come on then.” I hefted it and ducked unsuccessfully a bite on the nose which turned out, luckily, to be a kiss instead.

5

It felt really strange, going out of Four BEE.

You had to book your place on a sand-ship, but I was lucky, they said, this was an off-peak traveling time. Actually, it’s always off-peak now. The desert and those great black mountains and volcanoes, extinct or otherwise, give people the creeps. When I got aboard I could see my fellow travelers sitting around cringing, waiting to be flung out at the inhospitable bosom of what it, after all, our own planet. There were a few Jang, but obviously a complete circle who didn’t want an outsider like me slipping in. They looked pretty female, anyway, even the two males. And they were cringing too, while being superficially ever so young and daring. They’d probably never even sabotaged anything. I must admit the first sabotage I did, with Hergal and Kley, nearly an eighth of a rorl ago, I felt really agoraphobic about the great open spaces beyond the lookout post at 6D, though it was sort of wonderful too, to find something your stomach could really churn over at last. The two or three other passengers were Older People, one hugging a pink animal, and I tugged at the pet’s scruff worriedly.

“You dare,” I said.

The pet, unstained innocence incarnate, licked its shimmering coat.

After we’d been sitting around for a while, a robot came aboard from somewhere or other and checked us, with irritating slowness, against a passenger list in one of the steel pillars.

The robot informed me that my animal was unregistered, and I would have to sign a special document if I wanted it to stay on board. I nearly took the opportunity to have the pet thrown out, but couldn’t bring myself to, so I signed. The pet tried to bite the robot. There was a lot of noise. Hey ho, conspicuous again.

There were clankings and the whoopings of sirens, and we started off at a slow gallop. The ejector nets grabbed us with a bit of juddering here and there, and we eased, with a high-pitched whistling sound, out of the electricity wave dome that covers Four BEE. The light changed. There was a soft bang as the dome locks shut. The passengers all glared