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

for once, I’m just as bad as Hergal. I kill myself to get a change, not just because I’m tosky or depressed. But I’m not going to admit it too often. I daren’t.

I signaled him.

“Attlevey, Hergal,” I said. “What, still blue-haired? I think we both need a change. How about the Zeefahr?”

He was amenable for once.

We rode out there in his plane and poised a while among the clouds, watching the tiny speck that was the Zeefahr’s dome down below.

“Ready?” Hergal asked.

“Quite,” I said. I determined to enjoy it, but I didn’t.

He arranged the controls with practiced hands and leaned back, casual and nonchalant. Everything began rushing up at us at a ghastly rate. The dome grew bulbous, shining, terrible.

“Hergal!” I screamed. “Stop us!”

“Can’t,” was the last thing I heard him say before the impact blotted everything out.

And the first thing I said to him, as we woke up in the Limbo tub was, “Hergal, why do you always do it like that? It hurts.”

“Pain is a reality,” Hergal said, and turned out his communication light.

4

The circle got together at the end of the vrek and had this typically Jang party. I married Hergal, and Kley, male now, married Thinta, and Danor—having temporarily sloughed her following—just came and looked beautiful, and Hatta was just going to come and look ugly, and then didn’t come after all.

We used the floaters, drank fire-and-ice and snow-in-gold, had ecstasy and love machines, a lot of noise, having love, and messing about. Hergal and I had both got these angel’s wings. They were strong, actually and we found, by sticking to it, that we could sort of fly very clumsily, short distances—inside the clouds, of course. We’d both had an official warning from the Committee about our body changes. If we didn’t wait thirty units, they’d put us into cold storage for thirty units after the next suicide. It’s pretty uncomfortable, Hergal tells me; it’s happened to him before. And they did take away Hergal’s license on the bird-plane.

My bee crashed on my head in the middle of it all.

“I don’t know,” Thinta said through Kley’s hair, “why you don’t reprogram that thing.”

“I suppose I must like it falling on me,” I said. “I suppose it’s different.” I don’t often admit that either. I must have been pretty ecstatic.

We abandoned the floaters about dawn and ran through Four BEE singing and semi-flying, all the way to the Robotics Museum.

“Oh, don’t hurt it,” Thinta implored us. I think she must be approaching adulthood or something. I’ve suspected it for a long time. We floored robot caretakers and bashed about disconnecting things, feeling wildly happy and quite zaradann. Jang are always doing it, actually, but we kidded ourselves we were original. Then we stood around in the chaos, idly kicking at broken things with our gold-sandalled feet.

Four BEE’s yellow sun was just coming up over the rim of the transparent roof, bringing another unit of perfect, monontonous sunshine and joy.

I felt this singing noise in my ears, and the room darkened, though it should have been getting brighter.

“Oh God,” I said, “I’m absolutely droad.”

I think Hergal must have caught me, or perhaps it was a catch net. Anyway, I never felt myself hit the floor.

5

They were really worried about me in Limbo. Apparently I’d actually “fainted,” something nobody’s done for aeons. They popped me back in the Limbo tub and gave me a compulsory new body, in case there was something wrong with the old one, even though they couldn’t find anything. I had Thinta worried too. She came to visit me when they made me stay in for observation for four units.

“I’ve brought you some ecstasy pills,” she said, “and a moving picture magazine on fashion.”

“Thank you,” I said. I tried to look interested.

“Er, ooma,” she quavered then, “I didn’t tell anybody, but do you remember that funny word you said, just before, er, just before …”

“I fainted?” I asked. I was quite brave about my freakiness by now. “No.”

“You said …” Thinta paused. “You said you were droad, and you said, just before you said you were droad, you, er …”

“Look, Thinta,” I began.

“No. All right, I’m sorry. You said ‘Oh … God’?”

“Did I?” I inquired.

“Well, yes, you see, you did, actually.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t just a groan or something?” I queried.

“No,” said Thinta.

“Well,” I said, “what does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” Thinta said. “I looked it up in the history records and they sort of mentioned it here and there. It sounded like a kind of very large, special computer.”

“Doesn’t seem very likely to me,” I said.

“No,” Thinta said, “it’s just—it worried me somehow.”

Well, all right, so now I’m worried too. Thank you, Thinta ooma.

I worry sometimes now. I wake up in the night from all my weird dreams of the desert and think, God? God? But there doesn’t seem to be an answer.

I’m very calm now, anyway. Serene. Like Danor, perhaps. I don’t usually get excited or angry the way I used to. I suppose I’ve come to accept the sun, and given up biting at it.

Hatta signaled me again the other unit, all lumps and bumps and tentacles, and it seemed such a shame really, but I just can’t stand him like that. I know he needs this proof of love, I can understand; he’s trying to hide it from himself now and just keeps on again about how important it is to be ugly sometimes, and how going away with him as he is would be an Essential Experience. Perhaps it would and I ought to. Perhaps sometime I will.

And not long ago, as I rode in my bubble, I suddenly thought how wonderful it would be if there was somewhere in the city where you could die without the robots ever finding you. Of course there’s the desert, but it would be a kind of dirtiness to die deliberately in the desert in all my cityness, like using it as a huge vacuum drift.