by Tanith Lee
“After you left Four BEE,” Danor interpolated, “we disintegrated rather.”
“Poor things. It must have been absolutely awful for everyone, stuck there in the dome, and me out here in the middle of nothing and nowhere with nothing and no one—” I stopped just before the self-pity, creeping up under a cloak of fury, got me by the ears.
“Yes, we were selfish,” Danor said, “and very, very frightened. Up until you actually left, everyone kept going by being angry and fulsome, and having a mad time—like the party. But on the fifth unit …” She stopped and her face was pale, so pale it took me back into that Committee room when she had stood there, palely answering the Q-R’s rotten probings about Kam and her, her hands trembling. She hadn’t wanted to be there and answer them, but she hadn’t had much choice after I’d done over Zirk in the park. After all, it had been my own fault, hadn’t it, throwing around challenges, getting violent, blaming everybody but myself.
I sat down on one of the rather pleasing midnight-blue seats.
Danor didn’t resume talking. I could feel Kam looking at her, her looking at Kam, and great mutual gusts of sympathy for me passing between them.
Let’s face it, he hadn’t jumped down my throat for screwing his lover the moment his back was compulsorily turned by BAA Committee. And he had more rights than me, sniveling little predominantly female fool.
“Er, would you like anything?” he quietly asked.
“Don’t be kind,” I said, “or I shall smother the upholstery with tears. Maybe Danor could go on with what she was saying, and I’ll try to keep my ill-natured trap shut.”
“Oh, ooma—” said Danor, but Kam must have shaken his head, telepathically advising her to do what I said. They really were a pair, just like lovers in old books—one mind, one heart and so on. They’d have made you puke if there hadn’t been that sense of something shining and rock-hard at the spine of their idyll.
Danor went on in a light matter-of-fact voice.
“First of all, Hergal went and crashed on the Zeefahr again. We thought he’d given that up, quite a surprise. She—Hergal—came back a girl, and rushed off in a dreadful state with some other-circle Jang male to BAA. The male resembled your last body, ooma. It was sort of funny and sad. Thinta just shut herself in her green palace with swarms of cats. Mirri and Kley looked frightful. Mirri finally booked into Sense Distortion. As for Zirk, she got cut out of the circle. She was going around and around the city, female, with about six enormous other-circle males, and half the time saying she was someone else. So the Committee are on to her for Evasion, since paying for home and various other things in another name doesn’t count, apparently. And Hatta looked unbelievable the last time we met.”
“Utterly drumdik,” I managed. “I can imagine. Eight black eyes, four yellow ears, and a tail.”
“No,” said Danor, “that’s just it. Female, and beautiful.”
Even in my arrested state, this registered. Hatta—only once had I known him to be beautiful, and never female.
I’d looked up by now, and shown some signs of incipient animation. Kam had popped a button somewhere and cool glasses of a non-Jang white alcohol had appeared. I drank, cautious at the shared, unknown but tasty liquor. Was I going to forgive them their naive and unkind arrival, all glittering with their love?
“Yes,” said Danor, “Hatta as a girl is riveting. I don’t know what she felt; she never spoke of it. But obviously she was making up for lost time. She was marrying male after male—generally two or three a unit.”
“Oh well,” I said, feeling dreary again in my mateless condition, “good for Hatta. And what about you?”
“I sat in your palace,” she said. “I kept thinking about you. I know how stupid and useless and selfish I was. I hadn’t been exiled, you had. But, ooma, I couldn’t help it. People said you’d suicide and come right back to PD, but I knew you wouldn’t, not after what you’d told me—that dream. The desert was—part of you? I’d known that somehow from the very beginning. Do you remember the Archaeological Expedition? I thought it then. I thought you’d find some wonderful buried fortress or something, and stay in the dunes, oh, vreks. When you spoke about it, the sand was blowing there, behind your eyes.”
“She won’t believe you if you put it like that,” said Kam.
He might have read my thoughts, too—though I hadn’t balked at the words as much as I would if someone else had offered them. Danor wasn’t artificial. If she said she’d seen sand blowing behind my eyes, she meant it. And really, I knew what she meant, too. It stirred me, scared me, made me want to run out and start up the hoeing or dig another irrigation ditch.
“I believe her,” I said. “No doubt you understand why I believe her.”
He nodded, a little embarrassed suddenly, becoming aware probably of how they paraded their feelings without meaning to or being able to do anything else.
“But then,” Danor said, “Kam signaled me.”
“Ah ha,” I said, “just like in an old romance. I might have guessed.”
They both blinked, but, having got them both off balance, I didn’t feel spiteful any more, rather protective, really. Though they hardly needed my protection.
“I gather,” Kam said, “you know about the earlier business.”
“I think we both know about each other’s business in respect to Danor.”
“Ah. Well. Maybe.”
“To recap,” I said, “the Committee in BAA fed you a whole lot of indigestible rubbish about you being bad for each other.”
His eyes abruptly glinted.
“Don’t be tactful,” he said, “or I’ll smother the upholstery with tears.” Danor giggled. I found I had too. Oh, well. “The Committee actually said I was messing Danor up, so I cleared my unhealthy carcass from her path.”
“And then, despite many experimental love scenes with groshing older ladies, the nagging pain continued in your heart,” I said. They gazed at me. “Meanwhile, back in Four BEE, Danor wandered pale beside my pool in the deserted palace. And then. Hark! A signal popping and winking. Danor sadly switches on the image, and there, or here, is her lover. With screams of joy they greet. Well,” I added slyly, “you did tell me not to be tactful.”
“That’s all right,” said Kam generously. “You’re not far out. The screams from my end were somewhat deeper. Otherwise … I asked her to meet me in BEE; my boat was due in four units.”
“When we met,” Danor said, “we just went back to where we’d been before, only rather furtively. Kam really did pretend to be my maker half the time. I think Hergal guessed. Just before she fled with her new marriage partner, she kept on about you when you were a male. I think Hergal was more distressed than any of us. Isn’t that odd?”
“Peculiar,” I agreed.
It transpired that finally the idea had come to Danor—ignore the Committees and fly the cities, and live for love in the wild. They’d just come around to the notion when my film was flashed out. It made a sensation—which it hadn’t been meant to, at least not in the way it did. Possibly the Committee had allowed the film in the hopes that I, emaciated and dolorous with despair, would provide a nice extra example of what unsocial tendencies got you. Or possibly even, if I looked fairly healthy and jolly, people might stop worrying and debating about me, and get on with the droad city round. But—
“Half the Jang went running about on the mono-rails immediately after,” said Danor, “screaming and shouting. There were sixty-eight sabotages of the dome that night, and sand and volcanic ash and a couple of earthquakes got through. About forty Older People went crazy as well, and got roaring drunk in your honor, and drove the Q-Rs mad at Ivory Dome saying they wanted to get married to each other.”
“A historic evening,” said Kam. “In the morning the Committee signaled Danor, informed her that she and I had been registered as together once again, and must part for our own sakes.”
“So we said we were leaving,” said Danor.
“At which the Co
mmittee,” said Kam, “accused us, in a most extraordinary tone, of planning to join you in dangerous, out-dome, anti-city activities, and that, if we left, it would be assumed we also wished for permanent exile. Like you, we could expect aid and supplies, and like you, we could expect to remain outcast until natural death placed us at the Committee’s mercy for PD.”
“God,” I said.
Kam looked at me.
“That’s a very old concept.”
“So is the concept of androids working against people. But it sounds to me as if the Committee is boiling all over its electronic brain casings.”
“Quite,” said Kam.
“So why ever did you come?” I asked, breathless (breathless and girlish beneath these charming eyes I would have to accept as paternal or fraternal). “Knowing—what would happen.”
“I said they could be damned,” he told me, “and Danor said much the same, with a few colorful Jang adjectives thrown in. Because I want her with me, and she wants me, and if the only way we can have each other is by leading what, after all, used to be a perfectly normal life, then that’s the way it’s going to be. If you’ll befriend us, you’ve got a willing pair of hands for your greenery out there, two pairs, in fact. If not, and we realize you might rather not, we’ll go and try to get something started elsewhere, the way you have. The growth rate of vegetation in the desert is phenomenal, which has always been known, and accepted, and entirely ignored by everybody but yourself.” He was really getting going. I loved watching him. Better to have a crush on Danor’s Kam than on a flooping robot. “I admire the way you’ve organized this,” he said to me, and I glowed, choosing to forget the fact that almost everything had occurred as a result of accident, mismanagement, and idiocy on my part. “I’d like to help, and Danor would. And I’ll tell you something else. Four BEE blew to the skies the night they showed the film. There are going to be others coming out here, too. Plenty of them.”
2
Naturally, I told them to go. Go on, I said, who wants the company of sweet-natured girls and delectable males, both of whom praise me, and offer help for hearth and land, and promise further comrades to come, and who make me laugh and want to hug them sick? Well, obviously, I didn’t do any such zaradann thing.
We sat a long while over our white alcohol in Kam’s bird-plane. We got a little drunk and made drunken plans. I said they must come and live on the ship, for now at any rate. Plenty of cabins, I said. All colors of the rainbow—yellow, scarlet, apricot—but maybe they’d better have the violet one, it would tone with Danor nicely. And they’d be able to insist to Four BEE that they have a water mixer. Two, even. One for the home, one to make shrubbery. The Committee, if they hadn’t denied it to the Outcast Killer, surely couldn’t deny them? Naturally, they’d have to move out of my vicinity temporarily, in case the Committee monitored their position. (A beam had been installed compulsorily on the plane, so they could call for aid, etc.—or was it to spy on their activities?) While we were in proximity with each other, the Q-Rs would tell us to share my water mixers, but if Danor and Kam were over the mountains at the time, the city must deliver. Then, once the goods had arrived, my guests could return, plus water mixers, and we’d have three lots of “Rain” for the Garden. This seemed very logically worked out, and rather sharp. Kam congratulated me again on being devious.
It got latish, and suddenly the Sisters went off with their usual thump and the unopaqued windows pulsed with distant red. I’d been impressed by the windows and the arrivals’ lack of phobia. Love had sustained them? They didn’t jump much, even now. However, reaction to the Sisters expressed itself from another quarter. From somewhere aloft exploded Danor’s swan.
I’d forgotten the swan, and so had they, it seemed. Perhaps they’d slipped it something to keep it quiet on the journey out. Currently awake, it raced gawkily for the exit, and fled from the plane. Once outside, it burst into klaxon sneezes. Probably it had a pollen allergy.
Danor was concerned, and Kam practically helpless with laughter; I somewhere between. It looked as if the swan might well be a child substitute, too, for Danor, since she and Kam could never become makers in the city. Recalling my pet, and the horrendous adventure with the devil of the provision dispenser, I eventually sympathetically followed Danor down the ramp, out into the night.
Danor called to the swan across the dark, intermittently volcano-lit spaces of the whispering Garden. In reply, from odd nooks, eyes sparked gray (Gray-Eyeses, obviously) or gold (snakes). The swan meanwhile could be heard faintly klaxoning to the left and plodding stolidly over everything growing at ground level from the sound of it. I recalled that old fear of mine—that real desert animals might attack an android version, outraged at it for its weird similarities and differences.
“Danor,” I said, “I’ll get it; I know the paths,” and shot into the undergrowth.
I was going quite fast, despite Kam’s alcohol, when the klaxon ejections abruptly ceased, but right then I spotted the swan.
It was lying full length, swan-fashion, on the earth, and, for a second, I thought it was dead, and nearly let out a screech of primeval woe, as once before, so long before, yet clear as yesterday. More clear. The pet lying dead, and I—
But no, the swan wasn’t dead. It was lifting its brainless, elegant head, rubbing its neck on the stem of a tall flowering cactus—thankfully not of the prickly variety. And now the swan was rolling on the cool, water-mixer-moistened soil. Its plumage was filthy already and it had petals stuck all over its beak. But unmistakably it looked glad, in the throes of genuine haphazard pleasure.
I hefted it under one arm with difficulty, and took it back to Danor.
One hour later she and I had it in the bathing unit, flapping and flailing, as we rinsed our future from its lavender quills.
3
The bird-plane took off in the morning. Watching it go, even knowing they would be back, something shivered in me. But I put my stale fright aside. I wasn’t going to be alone any more. Danor and Kam, and others, plenty of others, so Kam had said. My head was ringing with elation.
They planned to put down just on the other side of the nearest ridge eastward, signal BEE on their monitor-beam, and let fly with all the jargon we’d thought up for the water mixers. Then Kam was going to adapt it—or them—as I had done, merely a matter of reprogramming them.
After that the bird-plane would return, followed at length by one (or two) water mixers, striding like terrifying beasts from a myth across the mountains into the valley. If Kam could inveigle the computer, as I had done, into using a displacement machine for delivery, the whole thing could be over and done by sunset tonight.
Tonight I would dress for company. So I spent about an hour during second meal with the clothing machine, arranging for smoke-amber satin-of-glass with amethyst fringes. Most becoming. The cosmetic machine could do my hair too, curls and coils and pearls and things.
The swan had gone with Danor, blessings on it. Last night it had rolled right over some fresh young flowering shoots, which had somehow survived. Yay and I did our usual tour in the tracks of the water mixer. We wound up on the northwest side, examining the curious earth fruits, which were now ready to be picked and tested by the food equipment for edibility. Of course, they might be poisonous or nontoxic but foul. Still, they looked nice, succulent red and yellow, and some little green crispy leaves in huddles, a sort of sand-lettuce, not to mention the bizarre, gold-freckled, dark tubers swelling in the shade. Borss and Jaska staggered into the ship with armfuls of stuff to set the testing in progress.
The sun was high and hot by now, the sky the hard deep turquoise of noon. The mountains were like carvings from night left behind at dawn, the edgings of sand like powdered silver. And here light was raining in dapples of golden green through the tall trees. The trees were rising in avenues; there were glades and beds of flowers, as if the Garden had actually been designed, as if someone had left the seeds ready, buried in the dunes, formally laid out, each held
in a dry time-pod until there should be enough prolonged water to break the spell and wake them. What an idea. Had someone? Some ancient, eccentric, brilliant ancestor of the cities, long before even the nomads violently trudged the waste?
Cogitating, up to my eyes in soil from the fruit picking, I suddenly heard the thrumming of a bird-plane, and looked heavenward. Danor and Kam back so soon?
No. This one was coming from the west. Coming roughly, perhaps, from the direction of Four BEE.
Off course, or playing air games. It would pass over.
A black speck in the burning green-blue sky, it resolved itself swiftly, showing its underside, dropping by hectic degrees. Someone was fiddling with the controls. Or, nervous, had screwed up the robot programming.
The plane swiveled slightly, and all at once dived. Instinctively I ducked, without real cause, as the vessel sliced the atmosphere above the trees. Was it going to crash? And on my prickly-fire bushes?
At the last possible split, the plane righted itself and flopped into an offhand landing in the grove of purple trees, about a hundred yards eastward.
I had been leaning on one of the metal things the robots rustled up to serve as hoes. Now, hoe in hand, soil on face and in hair, and combined interest, alarm, and ferocity in my glance, I made toward the belly-flopped plane.
They’d brought down some of the boughs, I furiously noticed, furious as a maker whose child has been bopped on the nose. Don’t tell me, the Garden is now a child substitute. The plane, however, appeared intact, its door stood open, and a wild din was emerging, a din you couldn’t actually hear.
Upper ear. Jang high-tonal-music tapes.
I reeled, swamped with giddy delight, scowling, and burst up the ramp into the plane, looking neither left nor right. I found the tape control instantly and, with the practice of vreks, smashed the button for silence. The mind-blowing horror receded. Shaking myself like a Gray-Eyes which has accidently rolled in some cactus, I glared about.
