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

around at the covered window spaces, looking ghastly with pretended jollity and sangfroid. And then this announcement came on that nearly made me choke with sadistic glee:

“Those of you who wish to avail yourselves of the Transparency Tower in the stern may now do so.”

And nobody, of course, stirred. Well, I mean, look at all that drumdik, beastly great desert, all those foul natural phenomena, like rain-carved rocks and wind-chiseled screes—I was up before I knew it. All right, I did want to avail myself of the Transparency Tower. The robot nearly collapsed, but tottered after me somehow to switch on a guide machine which droned on about natural features. The pet followed me and peered out too, probably remembering its desert home near Four BOO in the good old days, before stupid people dragged it out of its burrow by its long, curling, impossible whiskers, and condemned it to being a pet to some fool like me.

The T.T. was oval, made of glacia-view, resistant to atmospheric pressure, weather, sand, but completely seethroughable. The dome of the roof was also clear, bearing some sort of blurred crest of the old sand-ship fleet. They’re a pretty ancient institution. Everyone thought they’d be replaced by body displacing machines until we all found out that they make you vomit. By then everyone was anti-travel, anyway.

“How does it feel to man a relic?” I asked the guide machine, which was trying to bully me into turning into twenty pairs of eyes stuck in a revolving neck. “No, I won’t look at that geological fault. No, nor the extinct volcano on my left. I’ll do my own looking.” And I did. Honestly, the rock spires looked just like fantastic castles from some myth or other. I caught myself imagining they were, and stopped myself. Oh but… and the sky was dark, sort of turquoise more than blue, with a ghost of greenness moving through it all the time. Everything else was in tones of black, with the odd pinky-red vein here and there, except the sand which was just pale and seemed to reflect rainbow. Dust devils shimmered and canyons yawned, and I was just going into a quiet frenzy when suddenly the sides and roof opaqued. I had a moan at the robot about this, but apparently they clear automatically at certain periods of the day and then cloud pretty quickly, in case it proves too much for you and you go zaradann all over their ship.

Back below, I found the pet had run off and was having a fight with the pink animal, and everybody else was having hysterics. Couldn’t I control my monster, they wanted to know? No, I couldn’t; would they care to try? They backed away, and I lunged and somehow got the pet and an armful of teeth as well. The older female grabbed the pink animal and hugged its tattered, snarling body to her bosom. It kicked her.

Then, fortunately, this silvery ringing tone announced the arrival of a meal in the saloon, and we trouped off to gorge. It was pretty groshing, really, gold plates and so on, and goblets with patterns and little mauve bubbles blown in the crystallize. We started off with iced fire-tomatoes in red wine, progressed to root steak and forced beans in amber sauce with spices, and ended up with spike-fruits, desert plums, and lichen cheese with nuts. There were gallons of fire-and-ice and Joyousness, which contains ecstasy.

I ate alone and fed the pet from my plate, just to get on everyone’s nerves. It wasn’t keen, though, and only brightened up when the robot trundled up with its dish of syntho-meat substitute and cactus cream. I had to pay heavily for that. They even gave it some wine but what wine precisely I’m not clear on. It didn’t go into ecstasy though, or anything, thank goodness.

After the meal—apparently they only serve seven meals on the ships but you could get cold snacks in between; it’s sensible really. Even then, only one man attended every sitting—the Older People went off to watch picture-vision and the Jang had a swim in the pool-tank, which, I have to admit, tempted me. Not with them in it, however. I took one of the large moving picture magazines from the ship’s store and went to sit in the Transparency Tower, keeping the pet firmly tucked between my feet.

Quite soon the glacia-view unclouded and I saw a troup of long-eared things with antennae and ski feet, thumping across the desert at a great rate. They looked dreadfully purposeful and intense. You could imagine them grabbing you at parties and telling you all about the Movement. It made me giggle, then feel odd, as if I’d been cut out of a circle and had to cry. However, the pet diverted my attention by staring at them and barking.

“You’ve never barked before,” I admired. “You should do it more often.”

It gave me a withering look.

Several opacities later, I saw that the turquoise sky was blushing slightly on the horizon, over a tall black funnel of mountain. There was a dullish boom of earthquake thunder and the ship sort of shuddered ever so gently. Immediate signal for cries and screeches from below. In the saloon, where some of them were having another meal, a solitary crystallize goblet bounced across the floor. I resigned myself to the stupid glacia-view clouding over to prevent my incipient, though in fact nonexistent, paranoid hysteria. But it didn’t. It probably presumed I’d have run below, yelling and sweating with the others. So I saw this derisann and positively insumatt eruption, complete with exploding pink and mauve flowers of smoke, fountains of sparks, and a great whoosh of lava and black ash. What joy! The sand-ship, of course, was suitably programmed to avoid this sort of involuntary cabaret and took off from its air cushions at a steep angle, going to port like anything and soon leaving the panorama behind. Still, I’d actually witnessed a real event. The