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

“Oh farathoom!” I snapped.

Hergal looked a bit surprised, but he didn’t bat a gold fiber eyelash until I strode to the doorway.

“Er,” he ventured then.

“What did you say?”

“Er,” Hergal admitted. “Perhaps you’d tell me what circle you’re cutting me out of.”

“Mine, you thalldrap!” I yelled.

“But … who are you exactly?”

Well, I mean, Yd had it flashed all over the city that my new body was pale and slim, with knee-length silver hair and antennae. He just didn’t try.

Outside, my bee fell on me again, right in front of the Robotics Museum and a crowd of visitors from Four BOO.

I was so depressed I went and drowned myself, for the tenth time, in my bubble. Perhaps I could even get a duplicate of Hergal’s body and really drive him zaradann.

PART ONE

1

Of course, when I woke up in the Limbo Tub I’d changed my mind. Some quasi-robot medicine man was peering in at me.

“Look here, young woman—I see that is what you predominantly are—this has got to be stopped. This is the second time you’ve been back here in ten units.”

“Mmm,” I swam around a bit and smiled at him with my emotional response wires.

The Q-R went away, and someone came and asked me what I wanted to come out as, and by then, you see, I’d anti-Hergaled myself. How drumdik it would be if people actually thought I was Hergal! What with that, and that floopy bee swooning in my hair … I showed them the new me. As usual it was depressingly lithe and glamorous. Hatta, and lots of other people I know, nearly always make a point of having a fat body once in a while, or spots or something. Anyhow, this me was willow-waisted, with an exotic bust and long, long scarlet hair. I got into it, and it felt so odd I had to go somewhere quiet and have an ecstasy pill, and forget about it for a while.

Hatta found me not long after.

“Ooma Hatta,” I purred. Everyone always looks nice when you’re in ecstasy, even Hatta, who was being fat and spotty just now, with three eyes.

“Attlevey, ooma. Groshing again, I see. Don’t you ever get a mite ill with it?”

“No,” I said.

“I’ll take you for a meal. It must be coming up to some eating time or other, isn’t it?”

“Well, I’m hungry. I drowned just after meal three, and this new body hadn’t had a thing.”

We went out, Hatta holding me up—I was extremely ecstatic—and rolled on to the float-bridge. My awful, beastly bee came rushing out after us. I just couldn’t get rid of the thing. It fell on Hatta this time.

“Onk!” said Hatta, typically and nauseatingly mild about what happens to him. I threw the bee off the bridge, but it came back again. “Let’s go to the Fire-Pit.”

The Fire-Pit, they say, is absolutely the place to go if you’re feeling low. I almost cheered up, but, in the end, just before we got there, my Neurotic Need asserted itself and I had to get off the bridge and go steal something. It was alive, this thing, with long white fur and big orange eyes. Its whiskers got tangled up in my hair, and I gave it to my bee to hold a second or so before I got hysterical.

“Here we are,” Hatta said.

We jumped off the bridge, and fell about twenty feet until the electricity wave-net of the Fire-Pit neatly caught us. Hatta looked apologetic. In the Fire-Pit everything burns with scarlet fire. The tables float in flames, non-hot of course, and fireballs bounce gently in the plates. I matched.

“I forgot,” Hatta said, “about your hair.”

I’d calmed down now anyway, but he shoved another ecstasy pill into my mouth, just in case, and then had to carry me to a couch.

“What will you have, dear?” Hatta asked kindly.

I winced at his un-Jang vocabulary, hoping no one had overheard.

We had a large nut steak on fire, with all sorts of burning fruit stuck out of it on burning skewers. Hatta carved with the molecule needle knife and did it all wrong, but we got something to eat eventually. Ecstasy was wearing off by then.

“I hear,” Hatta mumbled through steak, “that you’ve had Hergal officially cut out.”

“Yes,” I said.

Hatta went on eating for a while. Our bottle of fire-and-ice arrived and he sniffed it and tasted it and stared up at the fiery ceiling.

“Eight-first Rorl, I shouldn’t wonder,” Hatta said. I fingered a skewer, but Hatta only murmured: “Er, I really admit you’re looking groshing.”

“Thank you. I can’t say the same for you, ooma.”

“The thing is,” Hatta said nervously, “I haven’t had love for two units now, and I wondered if perhaps we could get married for the afternoon.”

“Not with you looking like that we couldn’t,” I said. Well, I mean. Outraged pimples and a couple of tons descending on you with three yellow pupil-less eyes to watch the effect.

“Look,” Hatta encouraged me, “can’t you see that it’s an Essential Experience to have love with a body you’re not really attracted to?”

“Why?” No, I wasn’t going to be bamboozled with Jang Essential Experience jargon, particularly from reactionary old Hatta.

“Well …” began Hatta.

We were interrupted. Kley and Danor had arrived with a pet animal that immediately started a fight with my white, stolen thing, and therefore with my bee. In the confusion they drew up floating fire couches and helped themselves to our nut steak. They were both male this time, with long iridescent hair, and Danor had those silly wings like Hergal’s and kept knocking things off the table with them.

They vaguely greeted me and began chatting with Hatta.

I stood up, got my white furry animal under one arm, and drained my third goblet of fire-and-ice.

“I must flit, oomas,” I said gaily.

“Oh, but—” Hatta began.

“Thank you for a wonderful fourth meal, Hatta,” I gushed. “I’ll see you next body.”

I flitted.

Outside it was one of those depressing blue-crystal-golden-drops-of-sunlight afternoons. The weather is always perfect at Four BEE, but now