Biting the Sun Read online

  “You must kill him,” she said, not messing around or anything.

  “How?” I said. I wasn’t overly bothered. I mean, we were all bred hard fierce, and brave (as usual) out in this desert.

  “With your knife,” said the wise-woman. “Here, I saved it for you when we were raided.”

  And there it was, this bone-handled deadly blade, given me by my maker in my infancy or something. I caressed it, and promised to slay the terrible chieftain—the signal for my people to break loose and conquer the bewildered, leaderless enemy—or perish in the attempt. I was going to fall madly in love with him, of course, and not be able to do it, and he with me and not be able to punish me, and then our tribes were going to unite on equal terms, and everything was going to be derisann. Only things started going wrong.

  It was all right to begin with. I stepped out, having concealed my knife in my scarlet sash, and strode between the campfires toward his imperious tent, positively glowing with pride and beauty. Slaves held the door flaps for me and in I went to this blue incense gloom and the rusty murk of torches. And there he sat, dark-skinned and black-haired and marvelous, and the drums started, and these thin pipe things, and cymbals, and dried seeds shaken around in clay pots, and I poised myself and started a slow and sensuous dance, guaranteed to hypnotize the place. The music got faster and faster, and I whirled and spun, and then whipped out my knife and leaped at him. And I stopped short. I was meant to, but not for the reason I had. I was meant to halt because of his beauty, but actually I halted because there, on his cushioned chair, sat a great big furry ski-foot, gently flapping its ears.

  I yelled and dropped my knife.

  “Have some cactus-pineapple,” offered the ski-foot, indicating a silver dish. “Now, now, don’t be silly,” coaxed the ski-foot as I backed away. “I do so hate shyness.”

  I looked around wildly and found the whole tent-full had changed into the most ridiculous things with fur and feathers, long ears and trailing whiskers, little twitchy noses and long twitchy noses, horns and antennae and various tails, and they were all quacking and clucking and grunting away at me encouragingly. I only sat down because my knees went weak.

  “That’s much more cozy,” said the ski-foot. “Now, do tell me, why are you trying to kill me? Was it because of our raid?”

  “You enslaved us,” I tried to choke out all my prearranged dialogue but really, it looked so earnest and furry and concerned. I giggled hysterically.

  “Dear me, she’s hysterical,” observed a large plumed dragon on my left.

  “Have some wine,” said the ski-foot, “you’ll feel better,” and it reached toward a side table. But the table had ideas of its own. It unfolded four furry legs and walked calmly out of the tent, the wine and stuff bouncing around on top of it.

  “Stop it,” cried the ski-foot, and the assembled company gave chase, squawking and booming and falling over each other’s tails and apologizing. “Come along,” added my host. “I think they’ll need some help.” So it and I added ourselves to the chaos, and we all pounded after the table, through the coals of the campfires. The table broke into a run and we never seemed likely to catch it, though our pace didn’t slacken. We pounded over the dunes, under the white stars, whooping and hooting, and the ski-foot grabbed my hand in a large capable paw.

  “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 f
rom 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, monotonous 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?

  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 n
eed 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: