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

the dome. I was sorry to miss another real dawn, but I’d noted sadly that the window spaces in the plane were tastefully opaqued with a gold brocade effect.

We went to Lorun’s maker’s residence. The maker looked at us vaguely and asked which of us was her child. Apparently Lorun had been in a different body the last time they met. Lorun promptly said it was me, thereby causing tornadoes of embarrassment. We got sorted out eventually and the maker went away with a gorgeous older male with dark red hair, leaving us to our own devices.

We janged around the home, then went out to eat on a blue lake under the stars on a canopied golden raft, attended by jeweled quasi-robot girls with long hair made of non-wet blue water. BAA is the absolute center of all things rich and strange. Dragons with sapphire scales blew fountains out of the lake all around us. A pearl-encrusted serpent came up on the raft to peer at us and I had to grab the pet quickly, in case it thought this was another robot animal like the snake I bought for Hergal. Actually the pet got a bit tosky and went burrowing into Lorun’s chest, honking.

After eighth meal, we rode through a tunnel of specially grouped stars, very high up, on the back of a wonderful bird with burning silver plumage and a ruby beak; it sang strange love songs in a light, sweet, melancholy voice, the most beautiful and passionately sorrowing I’d ever heard. Practically weeping, Lorun and I lay in each other’s arms among the red cushions, and soon he said, “Marry me for vrek after the extension ends, or two vreks, you derisann angel of scarlet light.” I think the poetry was contagious, but anyway, I was lost.

“Oh yes,” I breathed. “Ooma, ooma, oh yes.”

But the extension wasn’t up yet.

10

We went out to this android animal breeding farm in Lorun’s plane.

It sits there, way off from the city, though you can still see the enormous glitter of the dome sides stretching up and up till they’re out of sight in the distance.

The farm, the first of seven, only one of which makes actual Q-Rs, is also under a dome, but a small dome with a mere pebble of a sun and sequins of stars, and they’re just around to get the animals used to it all. Apparently Lorun’s maker is one of the button-popping, dial-turning brigade, but even so you’re expected to fraternize with the growing animals, and it seemed really groshing, interesting, worthwhile work. I had this sudden vision in which my future gelled, more or less permanently married to Lorun, our child at hypno-school, and me working at the farm with his maker, being ever so companionable and all that. It got to me so much that I turned to him and said:

“Lorun, there was an ulterior motive in my coming to Four BOO. I wanted to find …” and then I hesitated, I don’t know why, although perhaps I really do know. I felt I just couldn’t ask about the child just yet.

“Yes?” he prompted.

“No,” I murmured, “after this. I’ll tell you later.”

He looked a bit irked, but let it pass.

We left the plane and went in and out of pagodas and towers and palaces, stopped by lakes and rode up to cloud masses where birds of fire and perfume were being trained to fly and sing. And after a bit I started to feel depressed out of my mind. I tried to fight it and got high-voiced and over merry, but it didn’t do any good. I think it was the pet’s fault, really. It went silent and started to shiver.

“I think the animals here scare it,” I said to Lorun, to start with. I mean they were all puffing out flame and scent and waterspouts and goodness knows what, and half of them were phosphorescent or watery, or disappeared at every third step and reappeared at the fourth, or something. And then I began to see that this wasn’t what got the pet down. The pet was an animal too, but a real animal, a born animal, primitively conceived and carried, hatched out of a warm, sat-on-by-a-furry-bottom egg, in the desert. These animals were made of the same molecules, by similar primaries and ovaries, but with the Q-Rs’ electrically motivated life-spark, and the same subservience to mankind. They’re for decoration. They are to be pretty and mythical. And suddenly I recalled my ooma dragon in the Jade Tower, and a pain burst in my heart like a great flower. How often had I sat in its harmless mouth, full of pine scent and green fire, that should have been able to champ me into mash? I knew an intense longing to cry but couldn’t, and held the pet to my face so that we could share our twin inhibited misery.

Lorun was elegantly, callously, leading me from lawn to pen, from turret to waterway. “Stop!” I wanted to shout. “I can’t bear any more.” I wanted to set them all free to play in the desert, and then I realized, with even more intense pain, that the real animals would run from them in fear at first, but finally would tear their defenseless bodies to pieces.

Then Lorun suggested we go stare in at the breeding tanks in their crystallize twilight, and I thought of my real, half-alive child, waiting for its own crystallize twilight, and gasped: “Take me back to the city. Please take me back.”

“What?” Lorun was immediately irritated. I became aware how irritable he always was when things went against his own plans.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I feel tosky. I can’t—it’s all those poor unknowing animals. I—”

“Oh, what a fool you are at times,” Lorun said almost pleasantly; he thought I was sweetly aggravating.

Misery changed to anger. I suppose I just felt on the defensive.

“Take me back to the city, v….n you!”

Lorun’s urbanity slipped, but his face said more than