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

“I’d like to apply for a new body,” I said.

Shocked silence.

“How long does it take?”

“Your request has been registered,” the quasi-robot told me. “Normally you would have to wait for thirty units. It has been marked on your records, however, that you have gone through fourteen bodies in the past vrek. You will therefore have to wait for sixty units.”

“Can I appeal?”

“Oh yes.”

“Will it do any good?”

“None whatsoever.”

I went out.

The afternoon was getting more tiresomely lovely with every second.

5

I went down to Peridot Waterway and signaled for my bubble. The water ran past going steeply uphill, a smooth pearly green. Buildings towered up all around me. My bee fell on my head but I was too depressed to sweat at it. That white, stolen pet landed in my arms and took a good-sized slice out of me. We slapped each other, and it jumped down to the floating road where a magnetizer caught it and slammed it up against somebody’s artistic, eighth-dimensional statue.

The bubble came along and I got in. I dragged the pet in with me, I’m not sure why, I suppose because I had stolen it. I always attach importance to the things I steal, except where my pleasure in getting them is ruined, e.g., Jade Tower. It sat and sneered at me, slitting its big eyes. I rubbed stuff on my hand and the tear healed up. The pet looked disappointed. I set the bubble for home, but I didn’t really want to go there. I’ll drown again, I thought, and farathoom to their sixty units.

I reached for the controls, but before I did anything I thought of the pet. It would probably go zaradann with panic; it just wouldn’t understand, when the water filled the oxygen locks. It wouldn’t like the asthmatic drowsiness of dying, and I couldn’t explain.

Oh well, I could always drown tomorrow.

Home. Home is where you tie your bubble, as they say. It was where I tied mine. We went up the moving ramp, me, my bee, and the pet, and under the big gold ornamental lamp in the porch that opens and shuts like one of those ancient flowers. Home. It’s all glass, delicately misted up at strategic points and shot through with rainbows. It booms to the echo of tireless mechanical voices, begging to know what they can bring us to eat or drink, or do to make us laugh. Music you could hear (but is it music?) raged around the glass halls, all clicks and tattoos and crashes and chimes. I signaled my makers and took the flying floor to where they were. Older People hardly ever change their bodies, and my makers were the same as they had been for vreks and vreks. They were both male; they had been male predominantly now for ages, very soolka in their dark beards and tasseled sandals, having a simply groshing, non-Jang orgy, with lots of older women in terribly sexual, opaque dresses.

“Who are you?” they inquired mildly.

I told them.

“Oh,” they turned a few memorizer mirrors on me so they could try to store my image somewhere in the place for future reference.

“Don’t bother,” I told them, “I’m changing again in sixty units or so.”

The flying floor wafted me away from them, and they returned to their antics without a backward glance, even at my hair. I remembered one of them, the one who had been my female maker all those vreks and units ago, hated scarlet. Oh well, perhaps she was more tolerant now that she was a male most of the time. I couldn’t recall when she’d last been female. Probably not since my post hypno-school period, when the two of them decided to set up home and include me. Usually people don’t bother about staying together, but my makers had always been pretty kinky.

Up among the slowly revolving glass turrets, I had to turn on the vacuum drift and be sick. I’d sort of been waiting for it ever since the Body Displacer affair. Then I immediately felt hungry. I’d missed about ten mealtimes, what with one thing and another.

Artistically shaped fruit, toasted snow-whirls and drinks with silver ice in them came whizzing to my aid, even before I’d opened my mouth. My makers had been adding telepathy units while I was out; I’d have to be careful. I wandered into the fur room, my feast following me on dainty crystal trays and singing atrocious little songs about how tasty it was, in case I forgot the filthy stuff was there. I settled in warm, smoky-gold drifts, absentmindedly eating it all up.

I turned on the picture-vision in the ceiling and lay looking up at the most absurd love-rites I’d ever seen. Everyone had about six bodies, and they twined and twined, gorgeous colors, amid the heavy aroma of incense and the slow hiss of cymbals. I turned off the picture-vision and had the ceiling open into a sixth-dimensional cube, but you had to be in the right mood to contemplate. Sometimes you really get going with it, it sucks you in, but when you’re low it just looks a mess.

I left the fur room and went to the pool. I injected myself with oxygen and swam for a long while among the waving jungle of exotic weeds at the bottom. I was a lost princess of an ancient line, seeking a monster in the turquoise depths of some forbidden sea.

Crash! That thalldrap, Kley, had signaled. The three-dimensional image of Kley and some tosky Jang party he was at careered all over the pool.

“Switch on, ooma,” Kley called.

“I’m tired,” I said. “Go away. Go away.”

But they wouldn’t go. They were in ecstasy, but with energy pills to make them energetic at the same time. Oh, it was ghastly.

I got out of my ruined, forbidden-sea pool, and the dancing image followed me through our neat gardens, bashing into abstract statues and whatnot, and getting tangled up in the five-dimensional pillars. I