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

I’ve wanted you as you are now, as you were with all that silver hair and the antennae, as you were all those vreks ago with soft-blue tinted skin and golden eyes. I’ve wanted you as a male. I’ve wanted you as you were last, pale and thin, a little nothing girl. Can’t you do the same? It’s not the body that matters; the physical side is a joke in Four BEE and BAA and BOO. It’s irrelevant. It’s like wanting someone because they’re wearing red toe-rings. Oh, ooma, can’t you understand?”

And I almost did. I really almost did. But I couldn’t stand the thought of having love with him as he was now.

“Go away, Hatta, I snapped.

And away he went.

3

And that evening Four BEE was shocked, stunned, stultified, nonplussed, and staggered by the news of the Great Archaeological Expedition.

Flashes came sizzling across the city. A “sympton of the times,” they called it, a “general desire to get out and at it!” Well, I knew the feeling all right.

Apparently this man, an older male from BEE, had spotted what looked to him like possibly ancient ruins out in the desert between BEE and BOO, but well off the sand-ship route. It was quite likely, since nobody ever went into the desert now except to rush through to another city, preferably without looking at anything. But this male—eccentric and exciting he sounded—actually went out there in his special private bird-plane, with clear windows! He’d been making some sort of study of ancient pre-city history, wars and sagas and whatnot, and then the civilizations that grew out of them like obstreperous phoenixes, nomadic and desert-roaming and so on.

I was fascinated as these flashes continued at great length. They ended up by saying this super male wanted volunteers. I nearly went zaradann. I signaled the Flash Center and asked where I could get hold of him. I just didn’t stop to think. I felt wildly excited again. My poor battered old brain was closing up to all the recent bad bits and fastening its frenzied tentacles on the Expedition.

The Flash Center robots were very helpful. They put me through direct to this man, in his weird all-long pillars and false-hair carpet villa. He was known as Glar Assule, the glar presumably self-designated. He was handsome but in a most odd way. He’d chosen a body that looked somewhat aged. I mean he had lines, wrinkles, and the jet black hair receded from a big domed forehead. He’d honestly made himself look just like a real glar from all those aeons ago. He wore a black robe and a single steel ornament on a chain. I gathered that the ornament was based on some design he claimed to have found in the desert on one of his earlier trips.

“Good evening, Glar.” I dug in at once, radiating enthusiasm, but he didn’t respond. He frowned at me.

“How may I help you?” he asked, looking as if the thought of helping me made him go ice cold from the feet up.

“Well,” I murmured, respectful, “I’ve just heard about your grosh—marvelous expedition, and how you wanted volunteers.”

“Indeed,” he said.

We sat and looked at each other’s three-dimensional images.

“Well,” I said eventually, “I want to be a volunteer.”

“I see.”

Oh floopy farathoom, it was just like chatting to a Q-R.

“Look,” I said then, after this long beastly pause, “if you want volunteers, you’re just going about the best way to get them, I don’t think.”

“Actually,” said Glar Assule grandly, “the sort of volunteer I had hoped for would not be one of the Jang.”

I laughed. No, really I did. It just rushed out of me like something with wings. I really detested him. He was literally chucking all the failures of the past vrek back in my face by saying that.

“You don’t want Jang,” I barked at him. He jumped. I can be pretty nerve-racking when I try. “Why not?”

“I don’t think I have to explain,” he said.

“Oh but you do. Common politeness, or have you never heard of it?”

He went stiff and pompous, then droned out:

“Jang are too irresponsible, I’m afraid, for the serious study I have in mind.”

“Well,” I said, “Jang are probably all you’ll get. We’re all pretty droad”—I didn’t care about using the slang on him now, he deserved it—“and have this groshing youthful enthusiasm apparently, which is being wasted. I personally can think of nothing nicer than studying an ancient ruin, in the middle of those derisann black mountains, but if you told my makers about it, they’d probably laugh till they puked all over you.” Whereupon I made a very nasty Jang-slang sign at him and bashed the recluse switch.

Well, he’d never take me on anyway, so there was no harm done, I reasoned, as soon as the glow wore off and I began to reproach myself.

But I got a real surprise. Ages afterward, when I was deciding whether or not to signal Thinta and go drown my sorrows with her somewhere, experimenting as to whether the pet would go around my neck, which it wouldn’t, the signal light came on and there was Glar Assule again, very edgy and pink looking.

“I think,” he waded in, “that your youthful rudeness points to possible spirit, and I might consider giving you a place on the team after all.”

But I was feeling sadistic.

“Oh yes,” I crooned, “and just how big is the team?”

He hummed and hahed, but we got there eventually. There were three others. Apparently he’d been sending out personal flashes for ages, with no luck, and the official flash had brought in these three droopy-sounding persons who were just doing it, I noted later, out of misguided notions of culture. They weren’t actually Jang, but they were useless. Twitty old Glar had realized I might be really interested to sit around and listen to him expounding theories and so on, and to poke about among the rumbling dark mountains of our lost forgotten world.

He still had to be a nuisance though. He’d