Biting the Sun Read online

  “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 home-coming,” 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 anymore and won’t ever exist anymore. 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 build, 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 anymore 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 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.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And you’re going to meet her?”

  “Kley,” I said, “right now I’m on my way to the History Tower.”

  “Oh no,” she said, “you’re coming with me. I’ve been reading the latest Jang love manual, the Purple Summit. You’re going to marry me for the afternoon and we’re going to do everything it says together, including the Trapezium with the red-hot Star-Whip, and—”

  “Kley,” I said, “look at me. Do I look strong enough to go through anything like that?”

  “Of course you don’t,” she snapped. “That’s how you had the body made, isn’t it? But if I know you—”

  “Kley,” I said, “you don’t.”

  * * *

  —

  Unlike the bright and burnished History Museum—where a couple of rorls worth of Flash Records and similar junk were kept—the History Tower, Harbinger of the Arcane, was suitably black, old, grim, and uninviting.

  And the facade worked pretty well. How many people went there? Twice, when I was pouring over some vis-plates, I heard the distant puttering of somebody else in another part of the building, the hiss of a flying floor going up and down. And once an Older Person, female and disapproving, came marching in to look up the origins of some committee motto for a treatise she was writing—or said she was. I wasn’t in my poetic body then, and she scowled at me as I slouched there robustly. I heard her later mutter something to one of the elderly robots that clanked about the Tower that Jang should not be allowed in.

  And when did I first enter those portals? About twenty units after I got out of Limbo that time, twelve vreks gone, when I made history myself by passing out cold, and was compulsorily refitted with flesh. Thinta had visited me, oh yes, I well recall. Thinta, clothed by innuendo: “Do you remember that funny word…” I had uttered it, apparently, on my way down. The funny word had turned out to be “God.” Thinta said she’d looked it up in the History Records. She said it sounded like a kind of very large special computer. She said it worried her, so she’d come along and worried me with it so she could feel better. In the end I arrived at the Tower to investigate for myself. I never really unraveled the mystery. The farther back you went, the more fragmentary the Records—and it was something to do, I believe, with the days when uncertainty was everywhere. However, I began to like the privacy of the Tower, and I began to delve into the Records, fragmentary or not, for their own sake. The things they teach you at hypno-school are barely a scratch on the surface.

  It was a substitute, too, let’s face it, for the activities I’d given up, like the Dream Rooms, since even the most meticulously programmed dreams—awash with swords, dragons, and so on—invariably turned into nightmares of the unprogrammed sort. The very last time I went I woke up screaming, and created history once again in Four BEE. I’d dreamed I was fighting a great monster of fire that burned flesh from bone, and it wouldn’t die however often I severed its head or pierced its heart. That was a dream I’d grown used to since, but at least I didn’t pay a Dream Room any more to saddle me with it.

  In the Tower, a crotchety robot came wheezing up. It looked quite pleased to see me, and its lights did a little display. The rooms smelled of metal and dust and a sort of incense smell, too, from some of the very ancient books which were kept in special vacuum containers and turned over by air jets rather than machine, to keep them from crumbling into bits.

  Actually I didn’t delve much on this particular visit. I sat in my alcove with some old (about ten rorls) music playing at me, and began to entertain rather romantic thoughts about Danor. Of course, she might be the disappointment of the vrek. Or she might have turned into a Hatta-horror, though it seemed unlikely. Poor frigid Danor. My reading up here had given me a few ideas. Looked at calmly, Danor was in the nature of a scientific experiment, but dress yourself in a poet’s skin and you find you’ve reached for a machine, and started to compose poetry to go with it. A Jang love poem for Danor, as elegant, charming, and empty as an unfilled room.

  She must have left Four BEE about the same moment I emerged from Limbo, carrying a cask of metal tape under my arm—that depressing saga of events I’d authored there. Possibly Hergal’s mouthings were true; she’d fled in fear of me, since our individual descents into misery occurred about jointly. But why come back?

  Finally I switched off the music and abandoned the alcove. Beyond the transparalyzed windows, the Four BEE sun was trudging down the sky.

  And there, on a steel bench, lolled Kley, smoking a hilarious golden cigar.

  “Paler than ever,” she remarked acidly. She flipped open an armband and offered me an energy pill, which I declined. “Going to faint at Danor’s feet, are you?”

  Yes, someone would always dig that up.

  “That shouldn’t be necessary,” I said.

  “Well, come on,” she vociferated. Her finger-long nails flashed in the sunset. “The whole circle’s going to the lock to welcome her in. Probably a few other circles, too, recollecting that old thing she had about playing hard to get.”

  “Go on, Kley,” I said. “Strain yourself; play hard to get.”

  She nearly got me with a sideswipe of those nails, and five robots came over and hustled us out with disapproving creaks.

  3

  Bells rang. A soft explosion marked the closing of the dome locks, and Danor’s sky-boat sailed down out of Four BEE’s turgidly perfect sunset like a large silver bird.

  You could tell the boat came from BAA, city of the fabulous. Rubies flashed on the covered window spaces, which protected the passengers, as ever, from glimpses of the wild desert that reigns and rampages about beyond the domes. And when the exit ports opened, they spilled a crowd in trailing cloaks of noncombustible fire and similar finery, and with alarming android pet animals and crates of extraordinary luggage, not to mention a flock of baas, now bees. No longer did I use a bee. I carried things about on my person when I bothered to carry anything. The old bee, which always fell on me, more than partly with my own connivance, now lay among that heap of forgotten detritus that cluttered the upper rooms of home.

  Hergal was loitering at the edge of the Arrival Stretch with Zirk-as-hero. Both gave me sidelong apprehensive looks, and Zirk flexed a bicep or two in obvious warning. Of Hatta there was, fortunately, no sign, and Mirri had not come either. Thinta, however, materializing in a mild frenzy, darted up and glared at Kley with one of those unique Thinta-glares that convey as much menace as a lollipop.

  “Attlevey,” said Kley, poking me in the ribs by way of a comma. “She here yet? Or do I finally say ‘he’?”

  “Are you all right?” Thinta asked me. “You look so washed-out. (Danor? No, at least, we don’t know.) Did you remember to have a meal injection?”

  Nobody knew what body Danor was going to be in. Zirk was having a bet with a Jang male from some other circle that it was that nice little thing in pink, and the Jang male—Doval, by name—was saying he thought it was the other, nicer little thing in red.

  “Yes, Thinta,” I said.

  “But are you sure?” Thinta persisted. “Because I’ve brought some nutrition pills with me in case.”

  Just then I saw Danor. It was quite easy to spot her—yes, her. The dashing quality and the poignancy were still there, and you could see them clearly, shining up like light through colored glass. If you really looked. The others were still jostling and haggling and waving at the four points of the compass. And Kley suddenly yelled out that maybe Danor had graduated to Older Person status, and slapped on th
e back a dignified woman, who promptly began to complain about it to the nearest robot. Amid the confusion I slipped my guards—Kley, Thinta—strolled across to the reception area, and reached it at the very split Danor came away.

  Hair like a blue raincloud, and a BAA dress of transparent lightnings. She was leading by a chain of sapphires a sort of swan animal, elegantly stepping on very stiff legs, its plumage just the shade of her own lavender eyes.

  “Hallo, Danor.”

  She glanced up and at me, quizzically.

  “You know me? How derisann. And you?”

  I told her.

  “Oh—” she said, as if she were going on to say something else, and then hesitated. But her eyes, those lavender eyes, were open as two doors on a sort of turmoil—alarm, pleasure, cowardice, memory. She’d gone right back to the time she/he jumped off the floater, I could tell, right back to the Secret. No one else knew, surely? No one but me.

  “You sealed my lips with a kiss, remember?” I said.

  “Did I? Oh, yes,” she said. Then a troubled frown. She had apparently progressed beyond that kiss now, beyond the Archaeological Expedition, to the part when I, uttering incomprehensible moans about God and boredom, fell prone upon the floor of the Robotics Museum. Returning afterward from Limbo, I had found her gone, or would have had I been thinking of Danor then. “Are you happy?” she said to me, blatantly, gently.

  “I’m noted for it,” I said. She looked away. “And you? How was BAA all these vreks?”

  “Insumatt,” she said, “of course.”

  Her swan meanwhile had lifted one stiff immaculate leg and was peeing up the side of a reception pillar, a thing which surprised me, since the android animals of BAA are generally without bodily functions. Two Q-Rs were spraying disinfectant over all of us except, maybe, missing the swan. Zirk had come bounding up too, and was staring nonplussed at the scene, his Herculean face going magenta with explosive emotion. Finally he got out: