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

found the recluse switch, and the party was gone, exploded out of its nonexistence back to its real existence somewhere or other.

I saw the pet bounding across the gardens, a white blur through the silk-of-aluminum grasses.

I wanted sleep.

I dreamed all night, unprogrammed dreams in which a nebulous, dark being chased me through fires and waters and finally bit me, while overhead the perfect ornamental stars under Four BEE’s invisible, domed wave-roof glittered and gleamed.

I remember that time at the Prism Playgrounds I had my dreams analyzed, when Hergal and I lost each other. Not that I understood a word of what the robot told me as I stared into its big electric eyes. I really think I was too busy cursing Hergal to concentrate properly.

In my sleep, I heard an awful crash. I woke up. A flash was blazing over the city. Hergal again. We weren’t far from the Zeefahr, and I nearly always heard the impact. I transparalyzed a wall and watched the flame streamers licking the sky.

What an unimaginative pest Hergal was.

But the flash was clearer now, and it wasn’t Hergal.

This time it was Thinta.

How utterly drumdik.

6

“Hallo, Danor,” I said.

He looked pleased. I’d recognized his new body immediately. I’d seen the flash as I gave myself a meal injection. (I can hardly ever face anything more solid first thing in the morning.) He’s always so slim and dashing though, whether male or female, that you couldn’t miss him really. He was all long hair and drooping mustache, totally the rage just now, and both absolutely jet black with a sort of sapphire sheen to them, midnight blue eyes, and no wings. Antennae, though.

“Like me?” He turned slowly around, and I admired him. He did look rather effective and was wearing a kind of metallic second skin, with the sort of boots I’d programmed in my dream of the cursed lover.

“Derisann,” I said.

It was quite late morning. When I sleep, I sleep on and on, often until Four BEE gets itself dark again and turns on the starlight. Otherwise I knock back my stay-awake pills with everybody else.

“Come and eat,” Danor invited. He adored food.

“Couldn’t,” I said.

“Oh. The Dimension Palace, then. Hatta said there’s a new labyrinth on Super-Seven.”

He was so enthusiastic, it seemed a pity to put out the flame, so we trailed along to the Palace.

The Committee, which is continuously bringing out reports on everyone and thing in Four BEE, states that the D.P. provides an “essential outlet for negative motivational reflexes.” Anyway, that’s what it says on the flashes.

The dimensions are, of course, interesting; air can be solid or different colors, or everything be inverted so that, for instance, you look at your nose in a mirror and have a fit because it’s growing inward instead of out and you can only see with your eyes shut.

All told, the Dimension Palace really shakes you up. It’s very popular. I suppose you don’t get many shocks in Four BEE normally, except when an automatic door opens upward instead of down, or something.

Super-Seven was a total nightmare and I didn’t last long. I suddenly found myself over in one place, looking back at myself in another, or rather at my body from the hips downward because I’d split in two. It was pretty ghastly. I mean you obviously haven’t really split in two or anything. It’s just that the law in this particular piece of dimension makes it look as if you had. I could even still experience what my legs and feet felt like, and when I put my hands down to them I could touch my thighs. When I did that I saw my hands appear by my thighs, which was reasonable, but as my thighs were on the other side of the room, it looked a bit drumdik. Then I found I’d split again. I was peering back at my faraway hips and legs and feet, and, a little nearer, my willowy waist and exotic bust and shoulders, all with coils of scarlet hair lying neatly about them, but chopped off at neck level. I was just a head presumably. Sweat leaped out all over me, and I could feel it all over me, thank goodness. What would happen if I moved again? I risked it. Farathoom! I was staring at my upper body now, and a bit farther off my poor disorientated head, and I was looking, actually, out of my feet.

At that my yells took on form and flapped all over the place; the panic button went off on my belt, and seconds later hordes of robots, oblivious of the ghastliness all around, hurried me back to sanity.

7

Danor and I floated drowsily in our adjacent baths of warm liquid air, still trembling from horror. Once the delicious relief wore off, I knew I was going to feel, as I always did, how futile that kind of nonconstructive terror is. But just now, completely attached to myself, my hair unfurling like a fabled red anemone, I was quite glad I’d come. Danor came drifting to the dividing wall and pulled himself over into my bath. We plunged around and quite soon began kissing each other, and then Danor hauled us on to one of the air cushions.

“Let’s have love,” he suggested, making the proposition quite appealing.

“You know that’s only for Older People,” I said. “It’s absolutely non-Jang not to marry first.”

Danor rolled on to his back and stared at the abstract picture mist on the ceiling.

“Then let’s get married,” he said, “for mid-vrek.”

Mid-vrek is forty units and that’s a long time, but Danor looked hopeful and somewhat tempting, so I agreed.

We took his bubble up Purple Waterway and dashed through corridors of mauve liquid, with Danor thumping the controls wildly. He seemed in an awful hurry.

The Ivory Dome is a good place to marry. The quasi-robots tend to keep their opinions to themselves, and not remind you all the time that on the last six marriages they did people who