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

had even less patience with them, and eventually found a curving and graceful Jang female and married her for the afternoon. It was brief, uncomplicated, and groshing. The way it ought to be.

And it was as I was lying back in the twilight feather grass of the park, returning her final wave as she slid deliciously away, that I had the crazy idea. I nearly went hysterical, even though you don’t go hysterical the same way when you’re a male. Different hormones or something. But I sat bolt upright, called my boo, and stared at my masculine self in the long molecule mirror.

I was going to be the other maker.

13

I tried to look as if I hadn’t spoken to the Q-R with the water carpet before, as I explained I was the chosen male. They wouldn’t have a record of me in Four BEE, I said, as I’d only just arrived. But, said the Q-R, the young lady had said the chosen male was in Sense Distortion. So he had been, said I, and she’d got fed up waiting and returned to me, one of her past loves from Four BOO. Now she was in Sense Distortion.

It was a bit thick, really, but I suppose Q-Rs are programmed to think of Jang as irrational twits, flitting from sensation to sensation and being tosky and zaradann in between.

Anyhow, after a brief wait, they accepted me.

I had another dream. This time I was with a blonde child who clung to me, all admiring, and I felt protective and strong, ready to guard her against any nonexistent dangers Four BEE might have to offer. It wasn’t a field of roses, either, but a fire-ride.

They said would I stay and watch the mating of the two halves, but I felt too emotional and my male impulse was to repress that, so I fled into the night. I was also a bit scared now that they might realize what was going on and refuse to go ahead.

I signaled Thinta.

“Attlevey … Hergal?” she asked vaguely. Hergal must have crashed on the Zeefahr again.

She looked very attractive, minus her fur now, with clouds of long green hair and a delicate, chiseled-looking pale body, so unlike her rather hysterically stolid personality.

“It’s me,” I said, and told her who I was.

“Oh! Aren’t you groshing!” she cried, evidently pleased. She always warms to me more readily when I’m male, I’ve noticed.

“Come and marry me for a couple of units,” I suggested, and she was almost in my lap before I’d switched off.

We went to a floater, and really, to be frank, I did it as much to hide as anything else. It was pretty derisann, though. Her current body was awfully lithe at the most ideal moments.

Near dawn, when we were having a brief rest, there was this horrible droning noise outside.

“What is it?” Thinta cried worriedly, clutching me.

We soon found out. Committee messenger bees can barge in anywhere. This one charged right up through the middle of the cloud bed. Thinta shrieked. The messenger indicated me and snapped:

“Come at once to the Committee Hall in Second Sector.” Amazing how they could program it to sound so utterly nasty.

“What have you done?” trembled Thinta. “It’s nothing to do with me,” she hastily assured the messenger.

So they’d found out, had they? Well, it was too late now.

“I’m very disappointed in you,” said the Q-R, “and surprised you should resort to such a foolish ruse.”

“Well,” I said, “it worked.”

“Long ago,” the Q-R obstinately grumbled on, “this would have been a punishable crime. Since the notion of crime has been abolished, there is nothing we can do, I’m sorry to say.”

I felt hurt in an odd way; he’d been so nice and would-be understanding before.

“But it worked, didn’t it?” I persisted.

“Worked? Of course it didn’t work.”

“What,” I demanded. “You mean you found out before you mated the two halves?”

“Indeed, no. I wish we had. We found out when we mated them.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“My dear young man,” said the Q-R, “have you never heard of two negatives making a positive? In this case, unfortunately, the reverse is true. Two halves of the same person make a decided negative.”

“But one was male and one female,” I protested. “I don’t understand—”

“We were dealing,” said the Q-R, “with a true-life and not an android.” Did I detect bitterness? I thought of the farms at Four BAA and began to feel strange. “With a true-life,” said the Q-R, “the most important element is the life-spark, and the life-sparks offered both belonged to one being—yourself. The moment they touched they exploded and returned into vacuum. You have killed your child. You will not, of course, be allowed to make another until you are out of Jang, and even then, I’m afraid, you may find it difficult to get permission.”

I knew I was going to be sick, and luckily he did too, and turned on an emergency drift for me.

He was quite kind afterward, and stopped me from banging my brains out on the crystallize chairs.

But he needn’t have bothered.

I went and drowned in my bubble the first moment I could.

PART FOUR

1

When I woke up in the Limbo tub, they started straight in at me. I’d gone and got myself a new body in BOO, and then gone and ruined it, and was still exceeding my ration, and I’d have to stop, and the next change—I must have screamed or had a fit or something. Apparently my emotional response wires got all tangled up and something overcharged itself and exploded. I yelled and yelled at them. They said I yelled that I didn’t want a new body, but wanted to stay there in the tub forever. They got worried about me and hundreds of Q-Rs fluttered around saying soothing things. They were promising me any body I wanted in the end and telling me that it didn’t matter how I kept exceeding my ration, and there, there, and I’d have to leave