Drinking Sapphire Wine Read online

  DRINKING SAPPHIRE WINE

  Tanith Lee

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Transcriber’s Note

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  Website

  Also by Tanith Lee

  Glossary of Conventions, Institutions, and Devices

  About the Author

  Copyright

  TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

  Although I have put the Four BEE into equivalent modern English, the Jang slang vocabulary which the writer uses pales in translation. I have therefore left the twenty or so odd words she/he employs untouched, and included a glossary, which provides an adequate if imperfect guide to what they mean. An additional glossary has also been added at the end of the book with reference to city and Jang customs and some other oddities, not explained in this second part of the autobiography.

  Glossary of Jang Slang

  attlevey Hello.

  dalika Violent argument.

  derisann Lovely, beautiful.

  droad Bored out of one’s mind.

  drumdik Utterly horrible, the most ghastly thing.

  farathoom Bloody, fucking hell.

  floop Cunt. See also thalldrap.

  graks Balls.

  groshing Fabulous, marvelous.

  insumatt Unsurpassable.

  onk Mild ejaculation, e.g., “Bother.”

  ooma Darling, honey.

  ooma-kasma Extreme term of affection, e.g., “love of my life,” not generally used.

  promok Moron.

  selt Slow on the uptake, easy to fool.

  soolka Well-groomed. Applied by Jang only to non-Jang.

  thalldrap See floop.

  tosky Neurotic.

  Vixaxn A word never written in full in the previous section of the autobiography. Though spelled fully here, the meaning—though obviously still pretty bad—is also still obscure.

  zaradann Insane, nuts.

  Glossary of General Terms

  Glar Early Four BEE title, similar to professor. The term hung on as a polite name for Q-R teachers at the hypno-schools, but otherwise was extinct by this time.

  mid-vrek Middle period of any vrek, lasting forty units.

  rorl Four BEE equivalent of a century.

  split Four BEE minute.

  unit Four BEE day.

  vrek Period of one hundred units.

  Part One

  1

  “Hergal,” I said, “if you say that one more time I am personally going to knock you straight through that wall.”

  Hergal looked at me in grave wonderment.

  “All right,” he complied, and said it. He didn’t look surprised, either, when I got up and did exactly what I’d promised I’d do. Maybe he was only humoring me. As he lay there on the other side of the wall, surrounded by bits of shattered silk-of-crystal, I added:

  “I suppose you’re too much of a damned ignoramus to know what comes next?”

  “Absolutely,” said Hergal, removing glittering chips from his long orange hair and wringing spilled orange wine from his sleeves.

  “Swords at dawn,” I said, “or pistols. Take your pick. My challenge, so it’s your choice.”

  “You have been at the History Records again,” remarked Hergal, “and as I observed prior to our little dalika just now, being a male half the time is getting you all tangled up, old ooma. You’re predominantly female, so why don’t you—” No chance to finish. I laid him flat on his back again.

  He stared up at me woefully.

  “Swords?” I inquired. “Or pistols?”

  “Graks,” said Hergal. “If you want to play ancient grandeur, do it in the Adventure Palace like everyone else.”

  And thus, rising to our gold-shod feet, we glared momentarily eye to eye, after which he strode out into the morning, whistling one of the current Jang favorites: “I only want to have love with you, for you are so derisann.”

  About twenty robots and Q-Rs, of various descriptions but unanimously unfriendly, were bearing down on me, so I also strode out of the little restaurant on Crystal Terrace and made off along Crystal Walkway in the opposite direction to my friend, mate, and crony, Hergal the Turd.

  To be quite frank, what really tied me up in a knot was the pure logic of Hergal’s deductions. True, I had been at the History Records—again. True, I, predominantly female as I was, had been male with no break for almost three vreks. There had, of course, been a variety of assorted bodies, but they were all much the same.

  There were many like Zirk, who, when a male, tended to rangy heroic types with shoulders the width of Committee Hall doors, rippling bronze musculature, and a loud persona—for which Zirk made up, when female, by being about three feet tall, delicate as porcelain, and timid as a Four BOO sand-rabbit. Then there were the ones like Kley, who, when male, was a quiet, well-mannered nonentity, and became a raging bully when in girl-shape. I, however, remained much the same either way. Always inclined to violence, chivalry, and general moodiness, the size of my breasts, or any alternative apparatus I happened to have about me, didn’t really color the situation to any vast degree—at least, I don’t think so. But my particular
circle, which had enlarged itself, as most Jang circles do, over the last twelve vreks, had got sensitive about my “eternal maleness”—as Hergal was pleased to call it. I had come to the conclusion that Hergal, himself predominantly male, resented my intrusion on his preserves. He and I got on well enough when I was female and he male. But I had noticed, as time slithered by, that when we were both of one ilk, the fur flew. Another thing that troubled male Hergal in the male me was perhaps my superior success with the female portion of the group.

  Thinta, in fact, was becoming a bit of a pain.

  “You need looking after,” she would say. “Someone to keep an eye on you. You remember that business before. I haven’t forgotten. Neither has the Committee, you can be sure of that.” And then, glowing her cat’s eyes at me, “We’ll get married for mid-vrek, and you can come and live at home with me, and everything will be groshing.”

  Thinta’s home was another of the ubiquitous palaces of Four BEE, with seven emerald towers, each one packed floor to roof with pale-green cats. Thinta had always had a cat fixation, which, unit by unit, seemed to be getting worse. Open a door in her place and a cat fell out; lie down on a couch in her place and a cat jumped on you. Having love there with Thinta could be an ordeal. The first time, I thought it was Thinta wailing and making those long, white-hot, silver-wire runnels down my back. But it wasn’t Thinta, it was three of Thinta’s cats.

  “No thanks, Thinta,” I said. “We can marry for a unit, yes. But we’ll go to the floaters.”

  But Thinta still liked to keep an eye on me. She would signal me in the center of night, and wake me out of deep slumber, and ask:

  “How are you?”

  She would arrive in her safe pink bird-plane at all the least convenient hours of sunlight, and say:

  “Are you sure?”

  Meanwhile, Zirk, when a sand-rabbit, timorously appeared at the tables of restaurants where I was eating, or on the surface of water-skating pools, and whispered flutteringly:

  “Why, attlevey, ooma. Fancy meeting you!”

  And Mirri, Hergal’s last love, the one he added to our circle personally, and with whom he spent so many secret hours, now pursued me up and down the movi-rails, walkways, and sky-lanes of Four BEE, her hair flapping like a rainbow flag, and her face alight with predatory instincts. Even Hergal I vaguely recall arriving at midnight in female form, and saying in a fascinated calculating fashion:

  “You know, I think I begin to understand you at last.”

  The scene with Hergal, however, in Crystal Air, had come about because we’d heard Danor was moving back from Four BAA.

  Danor and I. That was distant history.

  Danor and I and that silly chilly sequence those many vreks before, when she told me—he then, I she—that he couldn’t have love and like it. Danor jumping from a window in the floater clouds, and falling hundreds of feet into the city—pointless action, since the robots would be on him and have him removed to a new body inside the hour—yet just as if he meant it.… To me, now, that event was somehow the beginning of what happened to me, all those things that happened to me back there, twelve vreks in my own past. My fight against the world, the biting and snapping of a wild animal at the sun. Look over my shoulder, and I’d see, in the wreckage, the struggle to find a challenge, the wild attempt to make a child and the fatal mistake that killed that child in its crystallize twilight; the nutty relationship—the only relationship that held anything for me—my love and my rapport with that pet I never named until it was too late. My pet who died. Death, death everywhere, death in this society where no one dies.…

  “I wonder what sex Danor is going to be for the homecoming,” said Hergal, looking at me obliquely through his apricot lashes.

  “Female,” I said.

  “Yes, she did stick at that for quite a while,” said Hergal.

  Maybe he’d guessed why—because she said it was easier to pretend to passion that way. Lucky she never read the History Records as I had done, and found, among their other little horrors, the ironic essay on frigidity, some ten rorls old.

  “Still,” said Hergal, “she’s been in BAA long enough to get over her perpetual girlhood. That’ll leave just you and Hatta as the circle freaks.”

  I resented, I’ll admit, being classed with Hatta, whom we’d just seen bundle by outside, looking like a scarlet balloon on three legs that had been struck simultaneously by lightning and plague. Hatta had also thrown knives in my heart, but that was way back with the rest. Now he seemed to go about his compulsive ugliness in a spirit of inventive venom that was almost engaging. Each body was worse than the last, which should have been impossible. Maybe he hoped that we’d both throw up fourth meal at the sight of him when he leered in at the crystal window.

  “Seen Mirri lately?” I asked Hergal casually. I, too, had an armament.

  “With you, I saw her,” said Hergal, “but don’t reckon on making Danor. Danor cracked up when you cracked up, and got out of BEE to get away from you. That’s why this is the first time she’s been back since.”

  “How flattering,” I said, “to have such a profound effect.”

  “Listen,” said Hergal, “you sit up there on your tail in the History Tower, in the dust with a couple of rusty robots that don’t know what rorl it is. You read about things that don’t exist any more and won’t ever exist any more. Adventures, wars, illness, obsolete social behavior patterns—poets.” This last was a knock at my appearance, modeled by me from a sort of amalgam of the romantic pale young men who, with masses of loosely curling dark hair, slight and graceful builds, aquilinity of feature, and large shadow-smudged blue opals for eyes, were conjured three-dimensionally on the history walls from long-ago drawings of a vanished intellectual world. All these beings traditionally died young—of ancient, unheard-of diseases of the lungs, at sea, in battles, in burning planes and unexpected accidents. It seemed required of them, and I won’t say I never laughed in their pretty and tragic faces. Death of that kind was a hard thing to realize, even for me, in this place where death never permanently threatened human life. Imagine those poets’ expressions, rescued by the robots of Four BEE, and emerging newly clothed in flesh from the Limbo Tub. “Do you mean I have to write more verses of my bloody poem after all? How utterly drumdik.”

  “Listen,” reiterated Hergal slyly, “you haven’t had a body change for ages. Go to Limbo and have one, and I’ll meet you. Do you remember that body of yours with the cinnamon skin and the lemon hair? That was really insumatt.”

  “You mean the female body?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Hergal. “Why not get them to look it up and order it again? Then you and I can make a couple of units of it.”

  “So you know for certain,” I said, “that Danor is coming back female.” Hergal looked at me. I added: “Danor and I have a longstanding agreement. I shouldn’t like to let her down. Perhaps you could persuade Mirri. I’ll tell her I’ve got something else on.”

  “You only get them,” said Hergal, “because you’re still seven-eighths one of them. It’s cannibalism.”

  “What erudition,” I said. “Can it be you’ve been to the History Tower too? With so much time on your hands these days …”

  “You’re a misfit,” said Hergal. “You always were. You don’t go to the Dream Rooms because you can’t even get through a dream any more without messing it up. You’re trying to live eighty rorls back in the past because you can’t come to terms with things as they are.”

  “You can,” I said. “You’ve stopped crashing onto the Zeefahr Monument, and last mid-vrek you hanged yourself in Ilex Park off a jade tree, where all the kids from hypno-school could see you. How well-adjusted.”

  “At least,” said Hergal, “when I get out of Jang I’ll be able to make a little kid to go to hypno-school, since I didn’t manage to annihilate the last one.”

  Definitely he had been snuffling about in the History Tower. The words were archaic, as half of mine were now. But no matter. This was the
moment when I swatted him right through the wall, and we presently parted company.

  I’d known, however, despite my challenge, that he was a safe dead loss for a duel, even if he had read about them. Picture Hergal firing from the shoulder at ten paces in the dawn. Yawning would spoil his aim.

  2

  “Attlevey,” said a sharp metallic voice. I detected who it was before I looked round.

  “Well, if it isn’t Kley,” I said.

  Kley was female right now, which meant watch out, but, when I glanced about, in a new body. Dazzling. Hair like lava, eyes like raw gold, skin like polished brass, and dressed to kill in see-through patterned with gold daggers, and with a brazen skull—of all antique masterpieces—grinning on her groin shield.

  “I must say,” she must said, “you’re looking pale.”

  “That’s the idea, Kley. My body’s designed to look pale.”

  “Oh, yes. You’re being a consummated poet, aren’t you?”

  “Consumptive, ooma, consumptive,” I said.

  “Filthy,” she said. “Your ideas are absolutely sick.”

  “Sick as anything,” I agreed. “Sick as three Jang in an angelfood factory.”

  “And your vocabulary!” she bawled. “Those words! Factory? What’s that?”

  “A place where they make audio plugs,” I said.

  We were on the old, non-moving walkway that trails up from behind Third Sector Committee Hall, and leads eventually to the History Tower. It was a remote route, not much favored, for the Tower itself was rarely visited, and so Kley’s arrival on my heels was as unexpected as it was unwelcome.

  “You ought to pull yourself together,” she now bellowed, her voice striking and bouncing back off the steel statues lining the walk. “It’s all over the city about your dalika with Hergal. Even the flashes reported it.”

  “Whoopee,” I said. I had turned and was walking on, but she kept after me and even grasped my arm firmly with a gold-gloved hand.

  “Danor’s coming back on the sky-boat at sunset.”