by Tanith Lee
What can I say? Maybe not all that.
This is a kind of retaliation, isn’t it, to that other screed of mine, composed in Limbo twelve vreks before in distress and query? That—the question. This—the answer. Or part of the answer, for all my life will be a reply, to myself and to my world.
Maybe, though, I should only say that a vrek passed by across my valley, a hundred units. And that one day I went out of the ship,-and I saw everything with a kind of unexpected clarity, as if I hadn’t seen it before, hadn’t watched it grow, or helped it.
The sun was blazing down already, that cruel unbiteable sun. Black mountains cradled the valley, and a rim of glistening sand. Within that, My Garden, like a green smoke drawing nearer, and, as it neared, seeming a vegetable city with domes and towers, avenues and arcades, palaces and porticos, and a couple of Gray-Eyeses were running about in them, being careful not to tread on anything.
I was totally ready to cry, being, as I said, sentimental and a floop. Just then the monitor beam signaled me, a rare occurrence, so I packed away my emotion and went to investigate.
I had corrupted the computer too, so much was obvious.
It said only two words, but with such triumph, almost obscenely:
“Thigh bones.”
8
First unit of my second vrek in the valley.
Me on the veranda eating melon pancakes, thinking lazily of the work we were going to do today, Jaska, Borss, Yay, and I.
Water mixer on the prowl, dimly visible through an early haze, now and again hidden by trees, ferns, shrubs. A confused snake courting itself in the grass about nine feet off. Nose to tail: “Come on, give us a kiss.” The tail coyly refusing.
Then a familiar-unfamiliar sound in the sky, the snake going stiff as a ramrod, and I walking out and staring up.
Sometimes bird-planes had passed over, actually far to the west. Rarely did you catch their noise. Purely at random, I had established my haven well off the sand-ship and plane routes. This abomination, however, was directly overhead and presently swooping earthward.
Farathoom, and similar oaths. Watch out for the purple trees! (I had a name for everything—generally analogous. This saved muddle. Sometimes.) No, the purple trees had escaped barbering. The thing was going to land right in the cactus roses. It did.
Pancake still in hand, I thudded from the porch and ran to the plane. Very garish it was, and drizzling colored neons, but I didn’t bother with that.
“Get the Infinity off my flowers, blast you! Look what you’ve done.”
The anticipated robot voice came melodiously from the opening door:
“No need for alarm.”
“I’m not alarmed. But you’re going to be if you don’t move that tin can of yours.”
Just then the visitor emerged, a roly-poly machine, somehow conveying broad smiles, wires waving, lights popping on and off. It had Flash Center written all over it.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Some soup-brained promok spotted a fern in the desert, and mentioned it to some other Older promok at a Flash Center, and now they’ve sent a reporting machine to collect some pulchritudinous flashes to be pulchritudinously flashed all over Four flooping BEE. Yes?”
“Oh, yes,” chortled the flash machine, programmed by some incorrigible moron to sound like the worst type of human jolly. They probably thought the distraught Outcast would be glad to chirrup away to something human-sounding, however obnoxious.
“Well, old ooma, you can just hop back on your plane and go,” I said, “before I turn the water mixer on you.”
The flash machine looked uneasy somehow. Maybe it wasn’t rustproofed.
“Oh, but please. Everyone’s ever so interested. There’s even going to be a special interruption to Picture-Vision, and a perma-film of all this put on for five whole splits.”
That rocked me. The last time that had happened had been when—when—well, when? Ever? Surely the Committee hadn’t thought this up? Perhaps people were interested, or some people. Perhaps Danor might want to know how I was making out. Or Hergal. Yes, I could just see Hergal, reclining somewhere, semi-ecstatic, with golden limber limbs elegantly stretched like one of Thinta’s cats. He might even get romantic over me for half a split now I was in noncombatant female form. Thinta, on the other hand, liked me less that way. Possibly she would mutter something like: “I tried and TRIED with her. I did all I could. But she wouldn’t listen.” It hurt to think of them, but it was a pain I’d have to get used to. I couldn’t always just shut off whenever some image of the city stole up on me. Sometime I’d have to face it. But part of me had warmed. I looked at the flash machine differently.
“Well,” I said, “if you’ll shift that plane over a bit, and let me do the talking.”
“Of course!”
“And could you readjust slightly, and speak more in the frigid supercilious vein I’ve become used to with machines? Oh, and I’ll need half an hour to get ready.”
Vanity.
Oh, well, the first chance I’d had to be vain for over a vrek. Could be the last chance, too.
A good machine can rustle up clothing in fifteen splits if you know how to inspire it. I’d long since got out of wearing traditional Jang see-through in BEE, so I’d had lots of practice in the art. The ship clothing machine, left in the wall till now, nearly went zaradann, and threw off a gown of syntho-silk the color of fresh snow and embroidered with zircons. The cosmetics chute had fun, too, and tossed jeweled bottles of this and that at me with a disarming, childish delight. My feminine side had reestablished itself with a vengeance.
I emerged back into the outdoors, looking unbelievably glamorous and confident, eyelids enameled, earlobes spangled, and even the calluses rinsed off my ringed hands with medicinal salve. This was how Danor and Hergal and the rest were going to see me, if see me they did. Prosperous, fortunate, desirable, happy. And out of reach.
“You have been three half-hours instead of one,” stated the flash machine.
“Oh, good. You’ve reprogrammed to sound unpleasant. That’s a relief.”
“No I have not, but my batteries will go flat if—”
“If we waste any more time, so let’s get going.”
Full tour. Everything. They’d cut it later, anyway. Five splits! What could they show in five splits? Just enough, maybe.
Trees in a stasis of showering green, irrigation canals sparkling like crystal, the monstrous water mixer lifting on its legs and striding off, a solitary Gray-Eyes caught napping in the fern. Me, pampered and relaxed. Jaska and Borss digging Yay out of a subsidence. (“You’d better cut that.” Bet they wouldn’t.) Fruit ripening—no, I didn’t know what it was, but as it had grown here on the north side’ where the original water-and-provision spout had erupted, possibly some of the semi-constructed food had taken root or whatever it did. I’d be testing soon to see if it was edible.
Eventually the flash machine asked for a speech. I considered “Vixaxn the Committee,” succinct and sincere, but decided if I really wanted any old friends to see this reel I’d better think of something else.
So: “I just want to thank the Committee,” I said, dewy-eyed, “for being so considerate. I made a terrible mistake, as everyone knows, but, despite exiling me, the Committee has been the soul of good will and consideration.”
“How about, loneliness,” the machine asked, abruptly brutal, “and impending age?”
“You can be lonely in a crowd,” I said, “worse than out here. And age is something the ancients used to cope with, so I can cope with it, too, can’t I? Besides, I’ve got a good half rorl or more before I need start worrying about that. I’m built to last.”
When the flash machine had gone, it was rather quiet for a bit.
I tidied up the cactus roses, but they were tough, and their scarlet heads were soon raised high again. So was my sun-bleached one.
Finally I got on the monitoring beam and asked the computer if they would relay the flash film to me on my own Pictur
e-Vision unit. After a pause the computer said yes, and then:
“Currently, bones are reinforced while the child is growing in the crystallize tank,” said the computer. “So are teeth and nails. They no longer break.”
“That’s a relief,” I said. “Are you going to drop this femur business now?”
The computer rumbled.
“What is God?”
“I can’t tell you. Don’t ask again.”
“This word does not fit into my vocabulary.”
“Nor mine. Don’t worry about it. Get them to wipe off the tape or something.”
Rattle, pattle, ping.
The film wasn’t bad. I didn’t understand then (how could I? Maybe I could have, should have) how un-bad it was.
The Garden looked wonderful. Unbelievable. What effect would that produce after the silk-of-glass flowers and jade ilexes of the city? And I, well, I looked as I’d wanted to: radiant. My speech was in, even the hint of diabolic irony I hadn’t noticed had slipped through on the “good will and consideration” bit. Still, probably the citizens would just scream: “Ooh, nasty real rough trees with creepy-crawlies up them, and horrid Jang exile murderer much too brown, and never trust people who give themselves pale eyes, ugh!” And rush for the vacuum drift.
Peace be with you.
9
Ten days went by after the day of the flash-film. I had no reason to count them then. I went on hoeing and patrolling and inspecting, lying, as if dead, on the veranda in the cool of the evening, oiling J, B, and Y, and watching the stars budding in the night darkness and the shadows lying blue and purple along the spaces of the forest. The trees had continued to grow and were now about twenty feet in height.
The sun fell on the eleventh day, as usual, and twilight hollowed the sky, and the water mixer came swaggering home, folded its legs, and settled.
“Look at that sky,” I said to Yay, squirting oil into him and feeling rather embarrassed by the intimate gesture. (Heaven preserve me from getting a crush on a robot in my solitary state. I call them all “he” already.)
Looking at the sky, however, I saw a cluster of footloose stars, and heard again that tiresome sound which could only be a bird-plane. Off course, presumably. Over it went, flying south, and very low. Then, quite suddenly, it landed just beyond the perimeter of the Garden, about half a mile away.
I jumped up, half troubled, half elated. More Flash Center film to be shot? Or had those surplus food supplies come in early? I was very impressed they hadn’t sat down on the greenery. A glacia lamp of mauve chemical fire burned over the porch. I hooked it off and, attracted by diversion, began to walk in the direction of my mechanical visitor.
Not a long walk, following the useful little steel paths J, B, and Y had put down here and there. But I was to be met halfway.
A grove of ten-foot feather ferns rustled and parted. Shadows slid and dappled. Hard to ascertain form, even with the stars and my lamp. I ordered:
“Don’t come on for a split, robot, particularly with a heavy load. Let me guide you, or else you’ll go crashing into an irrigation canal like last time.”
“Attlevey,” someone said, soft as if the ferns had said it.
I nearly left my skin. The lamp fell on the path and bounced wildly like a lilac dune-frog into some bushes.
So I couldn’t see her, even though I knew it was Danor.
Part Three
1
“I’m sorry, ooma,” Danor said, “I didn’t mean to shock you. But I wasn’t sure what else I could do.”
I tried to say something, but my teeth were chattering too much.
“I remembered you aren’t male any more,” Danor continued soothingly. “And we—I won’t impose on you.”
“D-D-D—” I tried feverishly. Oh, God, get a grip on yourself. “Danor,” I grimaced.
“Yes?”
“Danor, you shouldn’t be—what are you doing here? Isn’t there some sort of Committee bar on anyone visiting me?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, so quietly only the greater quietness of the desert made her audible. “According to their records, no human must visit an outcast. If they do, they forfeit their right to return to the cities. They gave everyone a talking-to after you left.”
“My dangerous tendencies, rubbing off on you, contagious, like a sickness … forfeit rights to return … what do you mean? Do you mean—?”
“I mean,” said Danor, “of our own volition, we’ve made contact with you. Because we don’t intend to go back to the cities.” Very feminine and not at all coarsely she added: “They can stuff them right up.”
I wasn’t sure if the feeling in my chest and throat was nausea, tears, or nervous asthma.
“Oh, Danor, what an idiot. Get on your plane and get going. It’s all very well, I’ve got some sort of ambition out here. But it’s still rackingly lonely. Oh, get on your plane. Say it malfunctioned and you never meant to land. Say you spat in my face—horrid, antisocial freak that I am.”
“Don’t be silly, ooma,” said Danor. “I wouldn’t dream of saying it. Neither would—” she broke off, and through my panicky emotion I became aware that she’d broken off here and there before, and that some of the related actions had been plural.
“Neither would whom? You’re not by yourself.”
“No,” she said. “He has a private bird-plane. We can live in that if we have to. We don’t want to crowd you, or make you feel any obligation. It’s our own decision to come out here. We can move off over the mountains, if you’d rather.”
“You still didn’t say who,” I said.
“Kam,” she said. “Who else?”
She spoke his name, not in the way I’d heard her use it before, as if she had lost him forever and learned to exist with the fact. She spoke his name with a sort of exultation, not possessively, but rather as I had said, only half an hour before, “Look at that sky.”
And then, despite the unprecedented situation, and the amount that hung palpitatingly upon it, despite the fact that, as a female, I felt nothing sexual or even romantic for Danor, a pang of scorching jealousy went through me. A compound of many things, no doubt, recollected male pride in my lovemaking with the specter of Kam, who held her before me, hovering in the air; the fact, too, that no chosen male had followed me into the waste, no one had been near and dear enough to consider it or be considered.
“Shall we walk on, to the plane?” she asked. “Will you come and meet him? I came alone to try to lessen the fright I’d give you. How are you, ooma?”
“Simply derisann,” I grated. “Groshingly, insumattly marvelous.”
She lowered her eyes—lavender eyes, designed expressly to please Kam.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “You must think us terrible. We did see the flash-film. I think everyone saw it. But truly, ooma, I’d thought of this before. And we won’t stay if you don’t want us to. Even though you’ve made this place so lovely.”
An impulse in me told me to reiterate my warning to go, not merely from concern now, but from irrational malice. But, shaking to my soul, confronted even by two people to be jealous of—two people—I said hoarsely:
“Yes, all right. I’ll meet him.”
The whispery insects indigenous to the valley had long since made a home deep among the green, and by night their dry rustling filled the avenues of the Garden. Starlight flecked the paths and faceted unreal tourmalines to spark among the leaves. Once Danor’s eyes suddenly flooded with tears—something beautiful she’d glimpsed, you could tell. She said nothing more, afraid I should censure her cowardice in not risking everything till she saw what could be done with the dunes.
Parked on the southern perimeter, lights beaming, the bird-plane was blue and modest.
Danor went up the ramp before me. She called out nothing to him, simply stood there, then turned and smiled at me. That smile. It would have looked silly and sugary on anyone but Danor, but she gave it a sort of genuine gleamingness, or perhaps her authentic passions
did.
The plane, though smaller, was rather like that of Lorun, my sometime lover from Four BOO, everything laid on in miniature as it were, float-bed, bath unit, little provision dispenser. Of course, I was peering about at it, avoiding looking into the shadowy area of the control panel where Danor’s Older Male was sitting.
“This is Kam,” Danor said, introducing us politely. So I did look at him then. I felt disproportionately disagreeable, as I mentioned. The whole thing had thrown me flat on my nose.
“Attlevey, Kam,” I said, making a big thing of the Jang slang—Danor and me sweet young Jang, him elderly decrepit gentleman.
He wasn’t, naturally. He looked scarcely older than either of us, since bodies are all made youthful unless otherwise requested by the Older Person in question. Only in the eyes and the way he moved his face—his expressions—could you see the extra years, the Experience of Life. And he was a handsome bastard, in true style, smoke-dark hair, smoke-blue eyes, tanned like a beautifully varnished smoky bronze. Which made everything much worse. He was the first male I’d seen for one hundred and something days, and he belonged—every square inch, you couldn’t miss it—to my friend Danor.
So now I was jealous of both of them.
Yippee.
“Saw the film then, did you?” I inquired. He’d said nothing yet. He smiled too—what a smile that was, maybe he couldn’t help designing himself to be so attractive, but he could try and tone it down a bit for my sake.
“Yes. We saw the film together.”
“Oh, together. Surprised you made the time to see films.”
He laughed. Not at me, with me. Showing me I’d cracked a joke, and if I’d only get off my arrogance kick I’d be simply super company. I frowned unbecomingly.
