“Must keep together, you know,” it panted. The poor thing was quite out of breath already. It probably only wanted to hold hands so it didn’t get left behind.
Every so often something would fall off the table with a crash and we were soon rushing through thousands of silver dishes and goblets and crushed fruit.
“It’s no use,” the ski-foot suddenly said and sat down in the sand, pulling me with it Everyone else stopped and gathered around. The table gave a great kick of its furry heels and disappeared behind a rock.
“That’s the seventh we’ve lost in ten units,” said the ski-foot, and tears gushed from its eyes. “We can never catch them.”
Everybody started crying, and I started crying too.
And I woke up crying.
Oh, I complained. There was a terrible row at the Dream Rooms. Q-Rs rushed out and said I mustn’t upset everyone else. Eventually I was taken to this purple plush room full of robots, and this chief Q-R, also in purple, asked me to give them a full account of just what was wrong with my dream.
“Well, everything,” I cried. “I mean, it was a dream, an unprogrammed dream. And it really made me unhappy.”
They said they saw that and, oh dear, they just couldn’t understand it, it had never happened before, would I object to submitting to a mind reading? I said yes, I would object. They said the trouble was probably that I was thinking too hard about other things. I gave up eventually.
“I refuse to pay, though!” I added belligerently.
Of course, under the circumstances, they would not dream of charging me.
I went home.
Well, it was something to make history, I supposed.
I started to cry again, remembering those forlorn, zaradann animals, weeping over their lost table; then I saw the funny side as well, and started laughing at the same time.
Kley signaled me, looked frightened when she saw me, and hastily went away again and left me alone.
I wished I could leave me alone too.
3
I decided I could leave me alone, after all.
I’d been in this body a long while, even if it was two bodies, really, one a duplicate. I looked irritably at my scarlet hair. Gold would be nice for a change. I carefully never admitted that I knew no one would be bothered that I’d changed, no one would run away honking and hide its white fur and orange eyes among the silk grass, thinking I was someone else.
I knew Limbo would make a fuss if I asked for a change again. Humoring me was one thing, but I was a bit quieter now, and they might not be so anxious to help. I went and looked at the bubble, but I was bored by now with that way of dying. All right, I thought, I’ll admit it 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. I made them bury the pet out there—yes, I can actually say it now—but that was different. It had to go back into the sands that hatched it. I belong in this twilight that hatched me. Or do I?
Or do I?
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Also By Tanith Lee
Birthgrave
The Birthgrave (1975)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1977) (aka Shadowfire)
Quest for the White Witch (1978)
Novels Of Vis
The Storm Lord (1976)
Anackire (1983)
The White Serpent (1988)
Four-BEE
Don’t Bite the Sun (1976)
Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977)
Silver Metal Lover
The Silver Metal Lover (1981)
Metallic Love (2005)
Tanaquil
Black Unicorn (1989)
Gold Unicorn (1994)
Red Unicorn (1997)
Blood Opera
Dark Dance (1992)
Personal Darkness (1993)
Darkness, I (1994)
Lionwolf
Cast a Bright Shadow (2004)
Here in Cold Hell (2005)
No Flame But Mine (2007)
Other Novels
Volkhavaar (1977)
Electric Forest (1979)
Day by Night (1980)
Lycanthia (1981) (aka The Children of Wolves)
Sung in Shadow (1983)
Days of Grass (1985)
A Heroine of the World (1989)
The Blood of Roses (1990)
Heart-Beast (1992)
Elephantasm (1993)
Eva Fairdeath (1994)
Vivia (1995)
When the Lights Go Out (1995)
Reigning Cats and Dogs (1995)
White as Snow (2000)
L’Amber (2006)
Greyglass (2011)
Collections
Cyrion (1982)
Tamastara (1984) (aka The Indian Nights)
The Gorgon: And Other Beastly Tales (1985)
Women as Demons (1985)
Dreams of Dark and Light (1986)
Forests of the Night (1989)
Nightshades: Thirteen Journeys into Shadow (1993)
Tanith Lee (1947 – )
Tanith Lee was born in London in 1947. She is the author of more than 70 novels and almost 300 short stories, and has also written radio plays for the BBC and two scripts for the cult television series Blake's 7. Her first short story, ‘Eustace’, was published in 1968, and her first children’s novel The Dragon Hoard was published in 1971. In 1975 her adult fantasy epic The Birthgrave was published to international acclaim, and Lee has since maintained a prolific output in popular genre writing. She has twice won the World Fantasy Award, and been a Guest of Honour at numerous science fiction and fantasy conventions including the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa, Canada. In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious title of Grand Master of Horror. Tanith Lee is married to author and artist John Kaiine, and lives in the southeast of England.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Tanith Lee 1976
All rights reserved.
The right of Tanith Lee to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 12044 0
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Tanith Lee, Don't Bite the Sun (Four-BEE Book 1)
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