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

if to see us, or possibly to avoid seeing us and just stare into all that clear sky. And the sky was so enormous. It made me giddy.

“Here we are,” said the Glar, as grandly as if he’d invented it. “Come along.” And we trooped after him across the blood-soaked-by-light dawn sand.

He pointed to a rock platform and some rock terraces leading up to it, and up again from it.

“There’s the site,” he announced.

“And here’s the sun,” I breathed.

The pet suddenly lost its mind, or found its mind or something, and rushed from my side to roll and spray everyone with the crazy sand.

“Oh, stop it! Stop the nasty thing!” chirruped the females.

The Glar never even noticed.

He was striding on ahead, the robots and machinery trundling after him, making big runnels in the sand for us to walk in.

The site was supposedly something to do with those nomads and things, a primitive rock citadel where they stopped off once in a while, and these were the foundations. Assule reckoned they’d been covered with sand for ages and then some pre-rain storm had blown it all off. It would rain soon, he said, and then we’d have to scramble back to the ship and take cover. They were very wet rains, apparently.

The third female kept going swoony and having to lean on Assule because she hadn’t mastered the breathing technique. The others were furious they hadn’t thought of that one first.

We had first meal up on the site, sitting on heavy rugs. Assule went on and on about the civilization that had been here first. It could have been very interesting if he hadn’t managed to make it so boring. I don’t know how he did it, actually. Some latent talent for sending everyone droad, I suppose.

After this, he went stamping around the site, disappearing and reappearing from behind rock spires, with about six robots to give him a hand. The rest of us sat on the rugs and the world became turquoise all around us.

Eventually he came back.

I sat up straight and waited for him to give me an ancient swing-pick or something, but he didn’t. He said:

“I think I’ll start machines six and eight over there.” And my heart fell down the stairway of my ribs into my stomach and lay there like solid storm. Here we were again: Always consult the computer…. The machine knows best…. Oh, they pop automatically in half a split, anyway….

“But Glar,” I burst out, “aren’t we going to do anything ourselves?”

“What?” He was scandalized. “Of course not.”

“But can’t I even brush the sand off the relics as they come up?” I pleaded, being pretty optimistic too about those relics, I must say.

“Certainly not,” he said, “you might damage something.”

The three females fluttered agreeingly and looked at me as if I was obscene even to think of going near anything so precious with my clumsy Jang hands. So all he truly wanted us for was just an audience to his boring old voice.

And all through that derisann desert unit, I traipsed around behind those machines, with the pet at my heels. They drilled and sawed and nothing was found. They clipped and buzzed and inched up the terraces, and drew a complete blank.

“It’s definitely a foundation,” he muttered all over us, till I felt quite sorry for his embarrassment.

5

It went on and on, unit after unit. A bird-plane with covered-in window spaces flew out to us from Four BEE bringing supplies. The females cogitated sullenly. He was proving unobtainable, and they were pretty bored with his ideas by now.

And then, one evening, just as he was going practically zaradann with frustration, one of the machines gave a great hoot and a heave, and the rock floor gave way, and smash, crash, boom, down it fell into a vast underground chamber underneath. When the sand and gravel cleared, we pounded up and found we’d discovered a storeroom or something. At least Assule said that’s what it was, though I don’t really think he knew, but was just guessing.

The machines lowered other machines into the cavity to send us up pictures of what it was like, and very uninspiring it was too. The search lasted for ages, and eventually they unearthed this one shard of ancient pottery stuff that was actually, according to the Glar, breakable. So he wouldn’t let us go anywhere remotely near it, and the robots took it back to the ship to investigate it.

It was quite late when Assule came howling into the saloon, screaming about an inscription.

“It’s an old desert proverb,” he croaked, holding on to one of the females for support. She smirked. “Yes, yes, it is. You can just make it out. Look at this three-dimensional reproduction machine number nine has made.”

“What’s it mean?” we asked. It was unintelligible and blurred, and in another language, though one or two words sort of looked a little familiar, here and there.

“Ah,” said the Glar. He sat down and gave us another lecture on the nomadic peoples before he told us. What the inscription actually said was:

DO NOT BITE THE SUN, TRAVELER,

YOU WILL BURN YOUR MOUTH.

According to Assule, this was their way of saying be sure you stay in the shade where you can and wear your oosha—which is a sort of desert man’s sun hat thing—and carry enough water. In other words, the sun is a dangerous enemy; don’t take risks or you’ll get hurt.

But somehow there was another significance in the words for me. They haunted me all night, and I didn’t sleep. I went to sit in the T. Tower, and they haunted me there too.

Don’t bite the sun, don’t bite the sun—my mouth burned me.

6

Next morning Assule was much better, or worse, depending on how you looked at it. His confidence had been restored. He strutted and preened himself all over the place, and even allowed himself to have a half-interest in one of the three females. It was rather engaging, watching