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

stopped it by just gazing at them and saying, ever so silkily and softly: “Shut up, you double-eyed thalldraps.”

I felt gratified or something, and then a bit annoyed too, I couldn’t quite work out why. Anyway, not long after that we actually had to walk, and we were getting near the outposts of Four BOO. The lookouts here have names as well as alphas. The one we were after was called Dulsa D.

“Here we are!” they announced when we arrived on this flat rock platform at the bottom of millions of flights of non-moving steps. The lookout was a little bluish cube, set near one of the dome locks. We strode up to the ice-glass doors and pushed the call button. I began to feel really nervous, then realized how much I was enjoying being nervous, after which I went deadly calm and stopped enjoying it, which was a shame. Pink lights flashed in Dulsa D. A voice asked us what we wanted.

“Emergency!” we shrilled in panic-stricken voices. Honestly, I thought, you’d think if the Committee worried about these little disasters, they’d program their lookout robots to realize there can never be an emergency, that it’s only a lot of stupid Jang trying to get in and mess things up. I suppose that’s the answer. The Committee isn’t worried. How depressing not to be able to worry someone, anyone, no matter how hard you try.

Naturally, once our screams of terror registered inside, the pink lights changed to red, the usual succession of ten doors opened and shut behind us, and we charged in yelling. Sometimes there are two robots, sometimes only one. This time there were four. Needless to say, we thrilled to this prospect of action.

Lorun and Sarl and the other male grabbed the nearest one and crashed it into the one behind, then sat on the struggling metallic mass and pulled out their dismantling plugs. Three females rushed another and floored it with swinging ropes of crystallize beads, while horny-puss and I suddenly found ourselves comrades in arms as we jumped the last. I found its dismantling plug while she bashed it in the electricity reflex circuit with her horn.

Glowingly we congratulated each other and headed for the controls. But really, I thought, there’s not much you can do except create a very minor shudder in the barrier beams, which allows a bit of real weather or earthquake or something in for about two splits. Still, we’d blind ourselves to that and convince ourselves we were being daring and terrible, upsetting the system. We looked at the scanners and there were these three ooma mountains all starting to erupt at once, with lava pouring toward us.

“Now!” Lorun yelled, and everybody smashed around among the buttons and dials with practiced paws.

And the next thing we knew we were on the floor. Four BOO had given a great heave or something. Already the waves would be knitting themselves together again all around, but some of that lava was bound to get through. And then something struck me. This wasn’t rain, or ash, or earth-shudder that city buildings laugh at. This was painful, deadly, red-hot magma. In Four BEE the volcanoes are fewer and less active. I don’t think we could have got lava into BEE if we tried. But to try, to arrange things so lava would be the main course on the menu … I felt horrible, cold and sick all of a sudden.

“People will be burned,” I said to Lorun, with a surprising total comprehension of what was happening that I could see was beyond the others.

“So?” Lorun said. “It’s an Event. We’ve made something happen. “We’ve come here before, but never had much luck with the lava. This is groshing, my ooma. Enjoy it.”

“Oh, Lorun,” I whispered. And then I noticed something no one else saw: a little green light coming on and off in the wall. I went and looked at it, and it was neatly engraved with the words Emergency wave shield now operating. The Committee! I loved the Committee! The wise, wonderful, groshing Committee! They knew about Jang sabotage, but they protected the city. All right, let the Jang open up the dome but, with dangerous lava about, have an immediate response mechanism to shield the dome while the waves rescued themselves, and a mechanism you couldn’t get at, either.

Our sabotage had been thwarted, and I felt so happy.

I flung my arms around Lorun and kissed him. He looked pleased. He looked less pleased when we ran off afterward and found the city perfect and untouched. The others turned positively filthy. They somehow seemed to think I was responsible for their failure, and if wishing was doing, I suppose I was.

9

After the lava business, I should have been firm with myself over Lorun. But I wasn’t. All right, I reasoned, there was something—one item—about him I didn’t like, but I was still insumattly zaradann over him. I just couldn’t say “I’m off now. Get us annulled.” I informed myself that I would hold out until the end of our marriage extension, which was in about ten units, and decide then about the maker idea.

Then Lorun said would I care to go to Four BAA in his private bird-plane, and that settled it. Well, I wanted to see Four BAA, for one thing.

“My maker,” Lorun said, casual, “is something to do with the breeding farms. We can go and have a look around one, if you like.”

The bird-plane was super luxurious and robot-flown. We had love and played rather special Upper-Ear, which made you feel gentle and soothed as well as crazy with delight, and ate sugar plums on gold-ice, and were generally debauched.

The pet came too, and was just as debauched as we were. It gobbled up sugar plums and rubbed against Lorun with positively nauseating love luridly illuminating its wicked orange eyes.

The bird-plane went fast and we reached Four BAA inside a day, just before desert dawn and sunset in