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

“Oh, I’m not lonely,” I said, “just rather hungry. I’ve been so busy contemplating, you know, I’d forgotten about meals. Is there anywhere …?”

“Come with me,” said Sarl.

“No,” I said, “I want to go on contemplating. I’m going to have ecstasy soon. Could you bring me something, I wonder?” And Sarl, the thalldrap, went marching off to do just that. I looked at my spoils. Mmm.

“And you’re Lorun.” I smiled.

“That’s right,” Lorun said. He didn’t even sarcastically congratulate me on my remarkable memory.

“This is my pet. I’m afraid it might bite you.”

“Oh, I’m used to animals,” said Lorun. He came up and sat down, and soon there was the pet rolling on its back, with its six mad paws in the air, going zaradann as he tickled its tummy. Well, you couldn’t blame the pet. Really, the male had the most arresting body. He was sort of slight but muscular, with long powerful legs and groshing, artistic hands. His hair was quite short, only to his shoulders, and he didn’t have a beard or mustache, just these somehow frightfully endearing dark eyebrows and lashes, which were crazily derisann against his ice-paleness. Good taste.

“I’m sure you are lonely,” he eventually said, when he’d practically driven the pet and me out of our minds.

“Well, yes,” I conceded, “it’s possible.”

“Stranger to Four BOO, perhaps?”

“Four BEE.” I must confess I wasn’t even thinking about the child at that particular moment.

“Ah then, as a native, you must let me take you under my wing.”

“What a good idea. I’m sure it would be a nice wing to be under.”

“How charming you are,” said Lorun. “But what about your ecstasy?”

“It can wait,” I decided.

But he decided it couldn’t. We would have ecstasy together. Just then he spotted Sarl marching back to us across the lawns and terraces, bearing food and wine.

“Come on,” said Lorun, “or did you particularly want to eat now? We can wait if you like.”

I didn’t like, and said no. So we scampered off through the trees like naughty children at hypno-school, our boos dragging along the pet and the contemplation cube, with their lights out.

We had ecstasy in a robot-controlled bird-plane, but Lorun kept messing around with the gears and buttons, and it was like being with Hergal in one of his better moments.

In the middle of the most ghastly nosedive, that any other time would have frightened all the breath out of me. Lorun inquired whether I would care to get married for two or three units.

Even the pet didn’t make a fuss about it. I think it was somehow under the impression that it had married him too.

8

Well, I never thought I was cut out for idylls, but apparently I was. We really lived, breathed, ate, slept each other. Lorun also had a present maker who was absent then in Four BAA. Their home was a huge crowd of shut-in domes and spires under a palely golden lake, near the center of the city. It was a pretty select area, with not many other homes down there, under the fawn silk waters. Weird water plants waved around the windows, as we had love and had love and had more love.

And it was all such fun, apart from being so erotically satisfying. We romped and played about with the awful pet, and Lorun really didn’t seem to mind it tearing up the creeper curtains and ripping at the air lock doors. We went swimming and bubble-riding under-lake, visited the under-lake restaurants and playgrounds—also very select and very groshing too—talked and laughed and were crazy together. I really thought I was on to something, but I didn’t bring up the subject of the child just yet. Somehow there seemed more to this relationship than just a prospective other-self maker hunt. And then, when the three days were up, Lorun suggested we apply for an extension to the marriage.

We got duly extended and had love to celebrate, nice but not original, and then somebody signaled Lorun and said would he care to help in some Jang sabotage.

“Want to join in?” he inquired.

“Don’t you want me to, ooma?”

Lorun proved conclusively that he did, so we went together.

I hadn’t sabotaged a thing for vreks and vreks, and felt a bit rusty and tosky through the euphoria of being with Lorun. We met the rest of his circle, four weird females with tendrilous hair and one with a single whorled horn growing from her left temple, Sarl and another male. Sarl snarled at me.

“Er, attlevey,” I said, feeling decidedly alien. I said circles are getting terribly cliquey and this was a fine example.

“Attlevey,” they all droned, looking at me as if I’d just unexpectedly returned up the vacuum drift or something.

“You’re Lorun’s new marriage, are you?” horny-puss asked nastily. I could just tell her finger-long nails were more than mere Jang decoration.

“Oh, I thought you were still the last one,” said another female, with all-blue eyes and eight-fingered hands—even more nail danger. Well, honestly.

“Sorry,” I said sweetly, “I’m the new one with the quick temper and the uncontrollable homicidal tendencies.”

“Oh really!” they flounced, but still looked a little worried.

Lorun seemed oblivious to it all, Hergal-like, though none of the predominantly female females in my circle—like Thinta and me—were quite as atrocious as this lot.

“Come on then,” Sarl said, dismissing me as beneath his contempt. “Let’s not muck around.”

So we didn’t, but lolluped out of this floating park where we’d met, if you could call it that. We went by a succession of float-bridges and moving streets, terribly complicated, meant to be part of the excitement or something. I just got toskier and toskier, and eventually said they’d have to wait for me a minute. I went out and stole three chains of mother-of-pearl and amber, which I nonchalantly swung around my hips. I felt a bit better then but the circle grumbled about the delay, not realizing about my Neurotic Needs, which was just as well.

Lorun