Biting the Sun Read online

  4

  They checked me, thoroughly, making sure nothing had gone amiss with my nerve units or brain likely to create depression or hysteria, and made notes on the way I had designed my latest body. It was a Jang body, of course—not a weirdo body for Essential Experience like Hatta’s little efforts, it is true—but Jang nevertheless, at its carefree and most flower-like best. They also went through files on my other recent bodies, and I suppose they were all the same. They tested my reactions to ecstasy and energy, and even put me in a trance-state, in which I thought I was marrying that gorgeous, copper-haired male for the afternoon and then having love with him. I must admit it was derisann, but when I woke up again, I knew I’d sunk like a stone.

  Even the silver-water cordial they gave me, to lend me strength to face the Committee Hall again, was a sort of test.

  I went through the subway on a sledge, alone this time. A robot had apparently taken my bee and the pet on ahead of me to my bubble.

  A messenger led me back into the round room with the water carpet, and I sat down in the floating chair again, opposite my original interviewing Q-R.

  “Ah yes,” he said benevolently. “Not too exhausted, I hope. These tests are rather sapping, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Well?”

  He smiled.

  “Well.” He spread immaculate hands. “I think you know already.”

  “You refuse to send me on to the next stage?”

  “You’re not ready, my dear young lady. Your mentality, your tastes, your appetites are still belonging entirely to the Jang. Minor deviations do not count. If, by some error, we had applied for your changing as you suggest, it would have brought you almost immediate distress.”

  “This is absurd,” I said. “I’m distressed now.”

  “Of course.” He looked at me, anxious for my happiness. “I think you will find that the answer to your problem is to throw yourself more wholeheartedly into Jang pursuits. Fill your time. Stop thinking: ‘I must be joyous,’ and then hating everyone when you fail to achieve joy in this manner. Relax.”

  “Thank you,” I said stiffly. “I suppose I have to pay?”

  “That is entirely up to you,” the Q-R said blandly. “If you would rather not, there is no need.”

  So I was spared that at least.

  I went out feeling hopeless, in a sort of nightmare. I kept saying over and over to myself: They’ve done me. It’s all a big plot. None of those questions meant anything, just a sort of game to make me think they’d tried.

  I got to the bubble and shut the door, and kicked my bee into relative submission. I sat down, and there was the pet in my lap. I looked at the pet, into orange jungles of eyes that had lived somewhere far out near Four BOO, among rock-thrusts and restless desert.

  “They’re right,” I said, “it’s no good. I’m still Jang, and I don’t want to skip ahead at all. What’s wrong then? What is it that’s so terribly the matter with me?”

  And I put my arms around the pet and my cheek in its fur; it let me stay like that for ten whole splits before it bit me.

  5

  Hatta signaled yet again, and I was so fed up and bewildered I actually said I’d meet him for eighth meal.

  We went to Blue Sky and sat on the see-through floor, with the darkening city moving slowly under us, and tried to eat salad-on-ice without being ill from vertigo.

  They had assured me at the Committee Hall that my disgraceful urge to change from being Jang would never leak out, and that my friends, therefore, would never curl up into hooting hysterics at my foolishness—I more or less quote. I kept getting an uncontrollable desire to tell Hatta, though; he always seemed so reliable and stolid. I suppose the ugliness helped. But I didn’t. I think the Committee staff had done a good job and I really was ashamed.

  As we got on to the confectionery and cactus-pineapple stage, he thrust the marriage proposal at me again, and I again declined.

  “I couldn’t stand it,” I said. “I feel tosky enough as it is.”

  We sat and stared down at the lights lighting up, and I wondered why, if he found the need of me so pressing, he didn’t change into something attractive. I liked Hatta after all, and in a pretty body he’d be nice. Then I thought, perhaps he does it deliberately to stop me from ever agreeing. Perhaps he doesn’t really want me at all, and just likes to kid himself he does. This somehow made me feel as if I’d wilted, and I said I wanted to go home.

  He’s very good really. You know he’ll probably be around when you need him, and go away when you want him to.

  I wandered through my lonely glassy palace, looking vaguely for the pet, who didn’t appear.

  “You should throw yourself more wholeheartedly into Jang pursuits,” the Q-R had told me. Throw yourself, presumably, anywhere but at the Committee. All right, I would devise a program of adventures for tomorrow. Thousands of splits later I lost my mind or something, and went raging around, totally frustrated at my lack of enthusiasm for anything I could think of. I turned on all the picture visions and music units, and woke up the kitchen and house cleaners, and sat there in the middle of absolute chaos, pulling at strands of my hair.

  I took a hypno-croon to bed with me and got it to say to me, all night long in my sleep:

  “I will be constructive, I will be constructive. I will think of something wonderful to do.”

  6

  And I thought of something.

  I actually did. I opened my eyes with it nestling in my brain.

  I’d work.

  Something to involve me, take up my time, something to wake up for. I wasn’t quite sure what sort of thing was going in Four BEE. One of my makers had once done a spell with the flashes, and came back home every mid-vrek refreshed to an enchanting degree.

  I splashed happily in my lagoon bath, dressed as Jangily as I possibly could, just to please them all, and sped away to the Zeefahr in my bubble, thence to the Committee Hall.

  I was ushered straight in to my old friend with the water carpet, who looked at me nervously.

  “I’ve decided to take your advice,” I declared. “I’m enjoying being a Jang.”

  “Er, good,” he answered.

  “Like it?” I pirouetted, displaying all my beads and gold chains and flowers and tinsel and see-through. “And I’ve eaten the most popular Jang first meal, toasted angel-food, and bought a whole new track of Upper-Ear music—stolen it, actually,” I confided, all gay abandon. It was really wild. But my Q-R wasn’t taken in. His emotion gauges must have been standing up like quills. He smiled and said:

  “And what precisely did you want, young lady?”

  Smite him with my fiery wings, I thought.

  “Work,” I cooed.

  “I understand,” he said, and we looked at each other.

  “I’m afraid,” he said a little later, “that we have come back to the original problem.”

  “Oh yes?” I said, and I must have looked dangerous. His hand strayed to a summoner-button, ready to call in millions of loyal robots to rescue him if I leaped for his mustache or anything.

  “You see,” he said, eyeing me, “the Committee does not employ the Jang. Your minds should be free to explore recreation and pleasure. Older People, if they wish, may render some sort of voluntary service, certainly, but in the formative years…”

  “Have you ever asked any Jang whether they’d like to spend a few formative years doing something slightly useful?” I demanded.

  “Er—” he said.

  “ ‘New laws for new worlds.’ I believe that’s one of the Committee’s mottoes,” I galloped on.

  “That is not—” he tried.

  “And how do you know this generation of Jang is just like the last generation of Jang? Well? We might all be an emotional breakthrough, and you’re just sitting there ignoring it.”

  He looke
d flustered, but not by my brilliant, oratorical logic. He looked flustered in the way you look flustered trying to explain to a desert animal that it must pee in the vacuum drift, not up the picture-vision. But then he suddenly knocked the breath out of me by asking:

  “And what did you have in mind to work at?”

  “Well, what is there?” I stuttered.

  “Very little,” he told me, “particularly just at the moment.” He added: “You’ll be taking away the chance to work from an Older Person, who’s entitled to it,” but I ignored that. Who cared? Not him, I bet.

  And then he stood up.

  “I’ll take you,” he said, “on a little tour of Four BEE’s work centers. That is the usual procedure when someone has a query of this nature.”

  * * *

  —

  We rolled out in a little, low-flying Committee Hall sky-boat. The wind kept thrashing my miles of scarlet hair into the Q-R’s eyes, but he was very good about it. My bee fell on his head and he was very good about that too.

  We swooped into the nets of Second Sector’s Flash Center, and the way the Q-R just slammed off the controls and let us go down out of order, nearly missing the nets altogether, reminded me nostalgically of Hergal.

  Inside it was bright, plastered with jeweled slogans and reports of particularly brilliant (?) occurrences, such as the latest Jang sabotage, letting in a volcanic cloud-mass over First Sector two nights ago and blotting out the stars (oh, yes, both the Q-R and I remembered that one) or one of Four BOO’s desert animals escaping from captivity in Fourth and causing “havoc and destruction.” Well, havoc, possibly, I suppose. In the main hall robots came charging in and out, bearing tidings from every corner of the city, and screens relayed pictures from high vantage points complete with instant zoom-lens if anything epically frantic, like a moving street jamming for two splits, started to happen. I must say it looked very alert and alive, all of it, that is, except for the Older People, two of them, sitting watching picture-vision and occasionally popping a button or flicking a dial.

  “The robots, screens, etc., do the news gathering for the flashes, as you can see. The banks of monitors here receive and sort the Committee reports and essays on social behavior. This computer relays direct from Limbo each day’s list of body changes as it is compiled, and this one sends out individual identifications at the owner’s request.” The Q-R took me around the room and gave me his little lecture.

  “And how about them?” I inquired, pointing at the two oblivious workers.

  “Oh,” said the Q-R, “they work the buttons which activate each flash.”

  “So really, without them, the whole place collapses?” I asked.

  “Well, not entirely,” the Q-R admitted. “Each button pops automatically after half a split.”

  “I see,” I said.

  There were one or two other wildly exciting tasks, all of which would happen automatically if forgotten, which was just as well, as you could see the two workers had just about nodded off.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Where do we go next?”

  * * *

  —

  Pathetic, really. I thought City Planning sounded promising. Actually what happens is this: The Committee does a survey, for instance, and finds how the air traffic going to the Adventure Palace gets in a jam near the Time and Space Monument. So the Committee draws up a report saying this is because of the queue of bird-planes waiting to drop into the Monument nets, and how about making them a special bridge to go and queue on, which will get them out of everyone else’s way. This comes through on a computer and is translated by another computer, after which the message is given to the Older Person, officially designated Planner. Swooning at his exhilarating task, he digs up an assortment of suitable machines and programs them to work out the best way the bridge should be built, of what, when, how traffic should be diverted meanwhile, etc. Then, proudly bearing the machines’ mathematics, color proposals, artistic balance directions and sign-posting arrangements in paws clammy with enthusiasm, he trundles off to another machine park, gets a robot to feed the instructions into the relevant computer, and palpitatingly watches metal apparatus go to work making the diversion bridge. And they really kid themselves they’ve made something, this lot.

  “That spiral I constructed by the Thought Museum,” they modestly let drop, keeping one hot eye on the nearest computer all the time, just in case the Committee’s found a blockage in Purple Waterway, or anything similarly heart stopping.

  I was, by now, prepared for the worst at the Center of Artistic Design.

  It’s in pastel shades, with gigantic, almost-but-not-really-there water statues outside, and bronze trees dripping bronze foliage over you. I got tangled up and nearly strangled in my hair before the Q-R got me out. He gave me an odd look. Perhaps he thought I was going after a new body again.

  And then we were inside, up a couple of flying floors, and I got excited because people were actually doing things. I remarked—well, I squawked really—on this fact.

  “Ah, yes,” my Q-R said kindly, “there is room here for the personal touch.”

  Then we stopped to look at an elated female bashing bits out of a huge white stone block, and I noticed that (a) she was using a machine with a sharp biting tooth on the end, and (b) that the stone was marked out pretty clearly, and that the marks magnetized the tooth. A bit farther off, the artists had got tired and were letting the machines crank on with it alone, while they had fire-of-wine and biscuits.

  My Q-R must have seen me go all pale and mad. He said quickly:

  “The actual designing is done by the artists themselves.”

  “Prove it,” I challenged.

  We rode up again and found them hard at it, and they really were, only it went something like this:

  Artists’s question: “If I put a rod in at right angles on the left, will it balance?”

  Red light, indicating the thing will fall down.

  Artists’s question: “If I lift the rod with a second rod, twice its width, and support the two with a skeleton cube entering sideways, will it balance then?”

  Yellow light, and a spool of metal paper indicating that, yes, that

  might do it and (helpful advice) two skeleton cubes diametrically

  opposed would ensure success.

  There was also: “Look here, you robot, I can manage the eyes if you give me a hand with the cheek bones.” And: “Would your machine mix me that lovely yellow shade the sky goes at sunset? Mine’s gone pink.”

  I stood there and stared at it all, and went zaradann.

  “Get me some stone!” I screamed at everyone. It really bothered them. My Q-R touched my arm and I yelled even louder: “Stone, and a chisel machine! And paint! Now!”

  7

  Well, I was an idiot, wasn’t I?

  It fell to pieces, didn’t it?

  Not until I’d given it my all, though, of course.

  * * *

  —

  Robots trundled it up and sort of threw it at my feet, this big rough block of impossible-looking stuff. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and they were standing around gawping at me. The Q-R sat down in an artistic-looking chair and appeared to be contemplating.

  I took aim. There were no easy magnetized markings here, but the rush with which the chisel-tooth started nearly took my arm off. And I found I’d gone right through to the other side. Well, I mean, I’d meant to, hadn’t I? Courage! I tried another shot and this time nearly went right through the block after the chisel. I flicked my hair back and had another go, and managed to join the two chasms together with a thin swooping arc. I’d got something.

  I hacked and scraped away at the thing for ages, chips flying off into the magnetized pans in the floor, and soon I was crawling about inside the cavities, drilling and bashing. It was very intricate and I liked it, and I’d stoppe
d being conscious of eyes peering.

  All at once, someone grabbed me by my hair in an agonizing vice. I swore at them vigorously, until I realized it wasn’t a someone after all. My scarlet tresses had got wound up in the stone lace. The Q-R had to come down, ever so patiently, and untie me, and after that he had to come down again and again.

  “Oh, use a cutter or something,” I snapped, as I finally found myself hanging in a great big oval frame, in a sort of frenzied spider’s web of hair, with millions of stone chips buzzing around in it. My hair got shorter and shorter after this and, by the time it was lopped to the backs of my knees, I decided I’d had enough and got out before I went bald.

  There were enormous scoops of gloriously colored paint ranged up around my working area, and I dipped in and out of them with gusto. I began to change color too. My hair was now several feet deep in platinum pink, and I had a viridian nose. I played with the color to create illusions, painting the shadowed recesses in luminous, vivid tones, and the prominent planes thunderous crimsons and violets, carrying a motif in an unbroken line across varying angles, and making whirlpools like fire appear and retreat across the stone.

  We’d missed endless meals, my audience and I. It was well into the afternoon.

  I stood back and wiped my hand across my brow, forgetting. I didn’t care anyway. I was proud. I could see it now, high in the Sun Gardens of Fourth Sector, or gracing some glassy walk beside a waterway, reflected softly in the tide. I just hadn’t noticed the tiny little cracks where the chisel-tooth had slipped slightly, the small imbalance, the way one side was somewhat heavier than the other.

  I went up to it and brought my hand down on the top, a sort of pat on the head for my lovely stone pet. The minute I touched it, it made this ghastly sound and the whole lot, drooling uncemented paint, collapsed slowly and with filthy finality, inward, inward, till it was just a heap of rubble.