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

and then the Jang manage to sabotage something, and we get a groshing, howling sandstorm come sweeping in past the barrier beams to cheer us all up. I’ll never forget the time Danor and I, both female then, I might add, disabled the robot controller at Lookout 9A and let in a downpour of volcanic ash from one of the big black mountains outside, floods of it for units and units—everything went zaradann. They had to deliver food by bird-plane, and the roads were full of robots trying to dig us all out. We even achieved an earthquake once. Nothing fell down, of course, though we all hoped the Robotics Museum would. Hergal and I were sitting in a big crystal tower at the time, unsuccessfully having love telepathically, and it shook like jelly, which was more than we were doing.

I went to a call-post and had my new body flashed out, so my friends (?) would recognize me. I put a scanner on the Zeefahr and waited for ages to see if Hergal would hurtle out of the sky on to it, but he didn’t. So I signaled Thinta.

“Attlevey,” I said when her three-dimensional female image appeared in front of me. She looked nice, pleasantly plump, with big green eyes and sort of furry hair. She hadn’t changed for ages. Stability at last.

“Oh attlevey, ooma, I was just making a water dress.”

She held it up, greenly opalescent and gently dripping.

“Thinta,” I said, “I’ve just been drowned and come back like this, and I’m absolutely droad.”

“Oh, I didn’t know it was you,” Thinta said. She obviously hadn’t seen the flash yet. “Well, ooma, why don’t you go to one of the Dream Rooms? Wait a split and I’ll be with you.” She vanished.

Thinta liked the Dream Rooms, though it was reckoned to be pretty anti-Jang really. You always met lots of Older People with “set ideas” who told you you shouldn’t be there, but out having love and ecstasy or sex changes or Sense Distortion, like all young people are usually rigidly expected to have. I went into Jade Tower to steal some jewelery while I waited for her to come gamboling down in her miniature safe pink bird-plane.

Stealing is an absolute art, and one of my few simple pleasures.

There’s a big dragon in Jade Tower, bred on some farm near Four BAA. It rattles its jade-plated scales at you, and green fire comes out of its mouth and gives you a really invigorating, pine-scented, all-over shower. I’ve always liked the dragon. It stirs me in an odd romantic way. I once sat in its nice warm mouth for ages and tried to get Kley to rescue me, but he just took an ecstasy pill and rudely collapsed. I think I’d embarrassed him.

“Attlevey, dragon,” I said.

I got into its right ear for a while—it looks like a shell inside—and thought about what I might like to steal, while the dragon roared and sprayed away at everybody.

2

My bee, clutching my white, furry, stolen pet, followed me as I wandered innocently through Jade Tower. I waited subconsciously for both of them to fall on my head. Other people’s bees zoomed by, all efficiency and programmed determination to serve. I felt conspicuous—transparent clothing, chains of gold anemones, toe rings, fingernails as long as my fingers—utterly Jang. And honestly, I never liked wearing it all that much. You feel so naked if you forget to pop a tinselly flower in your navel, and finger-long nails are dangerous.

All the Older People nodded approvingly at me. I was just what a young person should be, tinkling, almost nude, my one-color eyes still dark from ecstasy, and my Jang vocabulary working like a catalyst in everything I said.

I sidled up to a large revolving tray of scent bomb earrings, smoking fragrance, light winking and glittering on their tortured shapes. I stretched out my hand. A floating mirror swam down to me and showed me my new face. I selected a pair of solid-phosphorous things, magnetized them to my ears, and watched them uncoil and wend lovingly down my neck, over my shoulders, and sigh to rest on my abdomen.

“Madam looks charming!” sang angelic voices in the domed, see-through roof.

I knew I’d come at the wrong time. Jang girls usually trail in in the mornings when the whole place throbs to Jang upper-ear music, which you can’t actually hear consciously but which sends you into euphoria in seconds. Then they can sell you practically anything, with machines screaming: “Simply groshing!” and “Ooma, how derisann!” all around you.

Then, all at once, I felt light-headed, happy, and abandoned. The older ladies looked bewildered and clapped in their portable audio-plugs. Upper-Ear had been turned on full blast. Zaradann with joy, I cursed Jade Tower’s observation robots. I removed my spoils, put my hand down among a pile of junk, and let them go. I brushed back my hair and magnetized about six pairs of coiled, random earrings which I had just picked up, and which were probably all odd, in the tangle at the back of my neck. But it was a reflex. I was too ecstatic to get any sort of satisfaction out of it, really.

I went past this woman on the way out. She was busy paying, working up into a real frenzy, and I noticed she’d left her audio-plugs out, so the Upper-Ear could help her along. Honestly, she must only just have migrated from the Jang herself.

“It’s so groshing!” she was crying while the machine, only going on her clothing and hair, was saying:

“Absolutely charming, madam,” and all the time the vis-take was feeding her enthusiasm into electrodes which changed emotion into power, and pushed it into Four BEE’s main power station banks.

It was rather sad, somehow. I never pay for anything if I can help it. I just enthuse ever so unexcitedly, and drive all the robot assistants zaradann.

3

Outside Jade Tower Thinta was waiting for me, looking as impatient as Thinta can