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

were more grateful and enthusiastic about paying, before rushing off and having love. In the creamy foyer we bought each other rings, five each for the left hand, and I just didn’t have the heart to try to steal mine, with Danor so gallantly bawling himself hoarse in the pay-booth.

We coughed along the moving spiral to a free hall, and got into all the floating white stuff you have to wear. The quasi-robot in a black robe and sparkling headdress took our vows of loyalty to each other for mid-vrek with a superb show of interest.

“I promise to have love with you and no other for the period aforesaid, unless I seek annulment, which may be granted on alternate units throughout the marriage, and which must be paid for.”

Four BEE’s power station banks do rather well out of this, actually, because long-term liaisons nearly always fade away quicker than the participants have reckoned. Four BEE covers itself on short-term alliances, too: if you only marry for a unit or an afternoon, which naturally falls short of the annulment period, you have to pay both before and after your stay together.

Danor and I exchanged the ten rings without dropping any. (Hergal usually dropped every single one and they made a terrible row, crashing and rolling all over that marble.) Then, together with our robot, we paid our “thank yous,” after which Danor dragged me out of Ivory Dome and into the bubble again, and we splash-dashed away to a floater.

The floaters, which drift gently in the sky and are made of plactic-reinforced cloud mass, are favorites with newlyweds. I’d been in them quite often, but their niceness seldom palls.

Danor pushed me gently but firmly on to a large, soft but adjustable bed of gold and purple storm-drift, and ran a melter over my clothing and his.

“I find your body most attractive,” he breathed. ‘It’s one of the best you’ve ever designed.”

Flattered, I smoldered under his caresses, and was rather shocked when he suddenly drew away and sat up.

“What’s wrong, Danor?”

Danor looked sad.

“It’s no use,” he said. “I thought, with you, it might be, but it isn’t.”

We tried again, however, in various positions, and it began to get dark, and we were tired of it all by then. We rested and drank love-potions, and swallowed ecstasy and energy pills, and finally lay side by side, panting with unproductive fatigue.

“If only,” Danor murmured, “we could have had love at the Dimension Palace, I know it would have been all right. It’s all this delay. It’s always the delay.” He peered at me soulfully. “I haven’t had love now, successfully, for ten vreks.”

I was horrified. Poor Danor.

“Surely,” I said, hiding my disappointment rather well, I thought, “it’s just that you’re predominantly female, the same as I am. Possibly more so. When I was male last and Kley was female, everything went splendidly. But you’ve been male for ages. I expect you need a change.”

“Unfortunately,” Danor said, “it’s no use then, either. Just easier to pretend it is, when I’m a girl.”

I tried to think of some bright encouraging sentence, but none came.

Danor went to a cloud wall and turned on the pressure so that a large oval window appeared. He looked at twilit Four BEE, glittering underneath.

“Goodbye,” he said. And he jumped out and fell hundreds of feet into the city. It stunned me. He looked as though he meant it, even though it was a pointless act when they’d only shove him in a new body ten splits after he hit the ground. A most weird feeling went over me, like when you meet the dragon in a dream—only not like that because that’s enjoyable terror and this wasn’t—and I struggled and tried not to let the feeling fill me up. And suddenly I recollected we’d married for entire mid-vrek, and now I’d have to pay for the annulment tomorrow. So a warm reassuring anger came instead. Annulment is something you can’t steal, and you can’t marry anyone else, even for half an hour, until you’ve bought it.

I fumed and fussed around the floater all night; I punched at those silly clouds and shouted at them when they served up this groshing meal I didn’t want.

I faced the dawn disheveled, not wanting to stay up there and hating the thought of-all that thanking I was going to have to do at Ivory Dome, with the quasi-robot probably looking disapproving that we’d lasted such a ridiculously short time.

“Attlevey, ooma,” said a voice, and I saw the signal light was on, and there in the room with me was the three-dimensional image of this gorgeous girl, with a body very like mine, except for jet black hair with a sapphire sheen to it.

“It’s me, Danor,” she said.

“Groshing,” I said. And a little cold bead rattled in my mind, but I was fed up to my back pearly teeth, wasn’t I? And I soon forgot it.

“I thought you’d like to know,” Danor said calmly, “that I’m going up to Ivory Dome now, to pay for the annulment.”

“Thanks,” I barked, and flicked the recluse switch.

8

I wandered around Four BEE all day, then felt a bit odd and realized that I hadn’t eaten again, and had a meal injection.

I fet Thinta near the Robotics Museum. She actually likes it in there. I didn’t know her at first in her new body, but she was just the same in fact, underneath the soft gray fur, and her eyes, although without any whites now, were the usual clear green.

“It was the Dream Rooms,” Thinta explained as we drank snow-in-gold at an underwater restaurant. “I always dream I’m some sort of cat thing. I wanted them to make me a cat’s body, but they refused. The fur’s only a compromise, really.” She started to grumble about the Committee and the way they hadn’t let her have a built-in purring system, and I got away as soon as I could.

I honestly wanted to cut every single friend out of