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

Cacti had leaped high in the night, bursting as they went into showers of green orchids. Pools lay between the rock sweeps, perhaps draining even now, but crowded with quick fern, starred with petals grown in seconds by rain, knocked free by rain in ten splits. And in the sand grass was waving. I looked and far off, in every direction, I saw the purple and the green, the gold, the peridot of blowing stems, not silk or glass or satin-of-steel, but living feathers, greenness that breathed. And I breathed, deeply, slowly, because the growing things had saved my life, had given me, in a night of miracle and silver, all the oxygen my lungs would ever crave.

I went forward, nervous at first, afraid to tread on this carpet of life, but all around the little animals were rushing, bouncing and orgying in the growth. I saw a tribe of ski-feet in the distance, dancing together in a weird, almost awful, dance of strange and primitive joy. Suddenly I was part of it. I, with my brand of mankind, my Jangness, my cityness. I tore off the ridiculous chains and see-through, the earrings, the ornaments. I could have put real flowers in my hair, but could not be so sacrilegious as to pick them. Besides, my hair was scarlet fur, and I danced and ran and laughed and sang with the mad small animals among the glory of the woken green; it was so hot now, I was dry as a bone.

Then I found the pet.

It burst at me from the grasses like a pure, pale blossom.

I can hardly remember the laughing and the running now, and the playing and the dancing, but I remember the happiness, the happiness like a wound, that bleeds the life-spark.

Oh, we ran, side by side, the pet and I, and never have I known such closeness with any of my race, my mankind, as I knew with that white animal I stole, in casual and neurotic need, from a store in Four BEE.

Once, when we lay in the grass, I said to it:

“You must have a name; no, no, you must. You are a personality, the same as I, a being, a life.” And I called the pet Thunder-Flower, because of the flowers all around us, that grew from rain and flaring light and thunder, and then we ran on.

And how simple it would have been if we had never found our way back to the sand-ship. But we did. I hardly noticed the slight familiarity of the landscape. The rock terraces were bright with flowers now in the redness of twilight.

We rushed on side by side. Sometimes I was a little ahead, knee-deep in the dune grass, sometimes it was the pet, its head barely cresting the green, its fur pink in the sunset’s aftermath. And then it was ahead of me and I saw it leap high, clear of all the grasses, and drop back, and not appear again. Then I saw the shimmer in the air.

“Oh no!” I called out to the desert and the sky. “Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no!” And I ran on and flung myself against the shock wall, that Assule had erected to prevent calamities.

Yes, it’s a strange sensation, an absolute tremble of fiery ecstasy all over, like the near-climax of a love machine, but I was barely dazed when the robots came and picked me up.

The pet, of course, was dead.

8

Assule kept telling me what a fool I was.

“I told you about the shock wall,” he shouted. “You might have been hurt far more than you were.”

He didn’t mention the pet. He did mention that any accident I’d suffered was really my own fault for rushing off so rudely. I just lay there in my cabin, looking at him, and said “Shut up” every once in a while. The females hung together in the doorway and said how disgraceful it was I’d been found quite nude, and where were all my chains and see-through?

Once they’d drawn off a bit, I made one of the robots bring me the pet’s limp, furry, white body. I stared at its glazed orange eyes. It looked so full of bliss in death.

“I want a plane back to the city,” I told the Glar. “Now.”

Well, he was only too pleased to see the back of me, so he got one, and I got in and rode home, staring at the covered-in window spaces, the pet in my lap. There was nothing left to see, anyway. The desert’s blossoming cannot be sustained for more than a single unit. The glory I had run through had been dying already.

At Four BEE I went straight to Limbo.

“This is my pet,” I told them, “it’s very important to me. I want you to give it a new body.”

But they wouldn’t, and I’d known they wouldn’t. They tried to explain how ethical they were being.

“We cannot do this for an animal,” they said. “Besides, it has been left too long.” But this was only an excuse. Oh, please, make it have been an excuse.

So I went home alone. And I was alone there too.

And I dreamed all night of the desert and the sun I must not bite, and at last I knew the significance that the proverb held for me. I was so tired I could admit it now. I had tried so often and so hard, and it had been no good.

The sun. Oh, yes. The sun. A little bit of breakable clay had suddenly defeated me, from its nest in a desert of rainbow and erupted fire. I knew what the sun was; perhaps those records meant it the same way, I’m not sure. The sun was the Ordained Way of living. In my case it was the Ordained Way of going to hypno-school, of being Jang, graduating to an Older Person, one’s entire life mapped out irrevocably, even death not allowed, but merely a new body,