by Tanith Lee
As for Esten, he had been invited into Talsi’s grove and graciously declined; he had been invited into Glis and Felain’s cabin and had declined even more graciously. Nilla had tried to lure him into Her Own Garden, but he had sensibly said he felt exhausted and was going to sleep for ten hours. I’d tried to keep out of his way, mostly because I’d rather have plonked myself right next to him.
“Take the green cabin,” I said. “It’s the last one free, and you may have to share with Naz, if he ever comes around enough to get there.”
Before Esten vanished to slumber, however, I’d seen him in conversation with Moddik at the workshop door. Very earnest they both looked. Was Moddik explaining the inter-valvular pump circuits or something?
I stamped about in the greenery in a furious state of complete irrationality, and uncovered, during the course of the afternoon, four sets of Gray-Eyeses having it off, a snake making a hole and digging up one of the anti-earth-tremor stabilizers I’d so laboriously put down, and a new mauve animal swimming in an irrigation canal, which took one look at me and fled wailing into the undergrowth. Gradually many new types of this and that were wandering in. A sand-rabbit or two bounced through the fern, and dune-frogs croaked messages to each other through the desert nights. The insects were acquiring most derisann extra colors on their tinsel wings, and very groshing they looked. I passed from wonder to annoyance and back twenty times, and it was sunset, all at once, before I was ready.
Moddik showed us the water mixer at sunset, his eyes brilliantly alert as the shiny little wheels that spun in the mixer’s dome.
It wasn’t lovely to look at, as he’d predicted it wouldn’t be. Rather shorter than the original striding giant of whipped cream and mother-of-pearl, its semi-opaque ice-glass dome looked slightly indecent. Its squat body, mounted on tall yet somehow squat metal legs, had a freakish demoniac appearance. But when he touched the activator, the water misted from it like a sweet dream.
It went bumbling off purposefully, just as the original stalking colossus returned. They passed each other, stepping imperiously over the smaller trees, and looking like a beautiful maker and her ugly child who, differences unresolvable, refused to speak to each other.
I thanked Moddik lavishly. The Jang were impressed.
Nilla said, “How drumdiky it looks. Not decorative at all. Makes me positively tosky,” trying to inspire Moddik to maul her. She was wearing her most unembroidered see-through and had been picking the flowers again to adorn her hair. Moddik patted her on the head with a wicked look of senile indulgence, and Nilla fumed.
We were going off to sixth or seventh meal, but Moddik said he’d had a meal injection and wouldn’t bother.
“And I can easily get through the night on some stay-awake pills, my dear young leader, and present you with eight or nine undecorative but useful water mixers come the dawn. Now I have the mold, it’s just a production line in here.”
“Stay-awake pills,” I said. “Meal injections.”
“You mustn’t think Jang have the monopoly on misuse of the body,” he reproved me. “Never fear, I shall snore the whole unit away tomorrow.”
“How disappointing for Nilla.”
The Jang were riotous in the saloon. Why not?
Danor and Kam, tired by honest toil, as I was, talked quietly with me. Naz floated above our heads on a float-cushion. Where was he getting so much ecstasy from? Moddik must have given it to him to keep him quiet. Loxi sidled over and invited me to the never-ending Talsi orgy, and I said something vile enough to send the entire menage hurrying off to their float-beds.
I went along the corridor with soil-burned feet and a spiteful mien.
Yellow cabin: Felain and Glis, no music now.
Apricot cabin: Loxiandphy, plus Talsi. It sounded like battle in there, what on earth—? Oh, graks to it.
Violet cabin: Danor and Kam. Controlling of foul thoughts. Sleep well, or whatever you’re up to, nice people.
Scarlet cabin: Nilla, who else? Pink Nilla on scarlet bed, pink hair spread on scarlet pillow. Nilla constructing a plan of action—how to get Moddik. Rotten dreams, ooma, and if you pick any more of those flowers I’ll bury you up to your neck in Gray-Eyeses’ natural fertilizer.
Green cabin: Esten stretched out for ten hours sleep.
Estenmyself.
The poet’s body, slender steel in a marble glove. Limber and strong as whipcord, didn’t I just know? Shadowy eyes, shut, lashes like black fringes of needles. White plains, dark valleys, hair line curling fern … Damn, damn, and damn.
Well? Why not go in? So you lost mind, soul, and heart to me, eh? Here I am. Show me.
Hergal, I said, almost aloud. Just the kind of mean, tantalizing game you’d play on me. Give me so much on a plate you know I’d never take it, then leave it all up to me to come crawling back.
Yet, so clever to make yourself me, to sound even rather like me, certainly not really like you, Hergal, my friend, my lover, whom I knocked right through that wall in Four BEE, thereby beginning the end.
I’d gone past. I’d reached my own cabin, the blue one.
I Went through the open door alone, and shut it.
11
The subtle muted cabin lights didn’t come on. Some other mess-up in my far-from-perfect ship. The malfunction didn’t seem dangerous, though. I’d see to it in the morning.
There were no lights in the bathing unit either, but the scented water worked, and warm air and towels jumped on me out of the wall with their usual terrifying alacrity.
It was very dark, only faint starlight smokily seeping in at the window through blue gauze—I’d forgotten to draw the curtain open, which was odd, for I thought I had. Maybe my poor little overtaxed mind was giving out.
I found the bed, not too easily, tired and bemused as I was, banging my unclothed anatomy on furniture, and uttering oaths resplendent in their inventiveness and squalor.
I sank on to the bed, head and body singing like slackened strings. And at once hands had me, turned me. I was gripped and held, firmly yet unbruisingly, close as the earth holds what grows from it, all the length of a male body.
I knew it at once. How not. It had been mine.
The contact was so vital, so instantaneous, so predictably electric, I could no more have thrust him off than I could resist some painless, potent anesthetic gas.
Skin on skin. He was naked as I was. He didn’t caress me or speak to me, simply held me there, letting my flesh find him out, even if my brain refused to do so.
But my brain, submerged, overwhelmed by my flesh, remembered and, remembering, conjured him from itself till we seemed one thing, indivisible. He understood my compliance before ever I put my arms around him, before ever I said:
“Tell me who you really are.”
“You,” he said into my mouth—his mouth, my mouth. “Who else?”
Later, he was laughing at me. I could see him laugh, for one small light—he’d asked Moddik how to fix the lights—had been allowed to come on. His eyes were sapphire in that dark glow, as my eyes must be too, for my eyes were still the poet’s eyes, Esten’s eyes. Those eyes would make us look, though all else was different, like children of one maker, one womb.
“Well now,” he said, “was I as good as you were when you were me?”
12
Dawn pierced golden-green through the forest leaves, the glacia-view, the blue gauze, and woke us.
“Dearest ooma,” he said, “what’s that racket?”
“Frogs? Binni-thing-a-mies? What racket? My heart, perhaps, stirred by your nearness.”
“Or mine by yours? No. A kind of humming.”
“Nilla in the bath unit?”
“Fool of my dreams. A metallic sound. Robots?”
“Yay in the bath unit? He’ll go rusty.”
“Do you always get this silly after love?” he asked me.
“Don’t you know, ooma?”
“Still striving to guess my identity when I tell you we’ve never met bef
ore?”
“Still striving. I’ll guess. Maybe I have.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, seriously, with that heart-wrenching, loin-quickening sorrow chiseling his handsome face just as it had once chiseled my handsome face. “You see, whatever else, you’re bound to be confused by the subconscious permanent notion that I’m really you. It diverts and tangles you up, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. I think it’s sick and perverted, and we’re a couple of perverts, you to think of it, me to agree to it. And don’t go on looking at me like that or I’ll demand further proof of how much I like it, and you’re obviously far too fragile to cope with so much libido, what with your consumption and all.”
“Balls,” said my lover.
“Quite,” I said, and got off the bed.
I could hear it now, that humming, very clearly.
I stared through the window, but sun and leaves and the ravages of lust made seeing out difficult.
“I’m going to investigate,” I said.
“You always were a nosy character.”
“Whoops,” I said. “ ‘Always were.’ Your former relationship with me is showing.”
We weren’t outside for another hour, of course. When we made it, both pairs of sapphire-opal eyes with romantic rings under them, the terrace was alive. Everyone was out, and first meal was being eaten.
Danor glanced up at us, and never smiled. Or rather, her whole body smiled, everything absolutely beaming approval, everything but her mouth, which she very carefully kept straight. Kam, on the other hand, grinned broadly, and said something under his breath that sounded like “Cheers.”
The Jang were too preoccupied with being Jang really to notice; only Nilla shot us an evil look, and Esten bowed to her.
Then a warm, murmurous voice sounded in my ear, and surprised me: Talsi.
“Moddik has asked us to meet him, just beyond the purple trees, as soon as possible.”
“Do you mean to say he’s really made nine water mixers?” I asked.
Talsi said, “Very definitely. I think the dear creature wants to show them off.”
“Why not?” I cried, grabbing up a fruit from the table—everyone seemed to be eating them now, bar Nilla. Even Naz had a sun-peach, but he was probably too blasted to realize what it was, maybe thought it was a syntho-cake or something.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go and see Moddik’s water mixers.”
The Jang groaned and prised themselves off the angelfood. One good thing, when the provision dispenser had to switch onto pure syntho-basics there’d be no more of that yuk served up on my ship.
Esten, Danor, Kam, and I went first, the Jang tottering after. Glis and Felain had even persuaded Naz into coming. Talsi came last, rather as if shepherding us. Her maternal sex-drive thing again?
We’d forgotten about the humming, Esten and I, and got used to it meanwhile. Now I recollected, because right here was the source.
“Good day,” said Moddik, as we emerged on the grass lawn just beyond the grove, and found ourselves facing a semicircle of water mixers.
“Moddik!” I exclaimed. “There are twelve! Do they all work?”
“Of course. Do you doubt the master?”
“Activate them,” I pleaded. “Let’s get soaked with mixed-water rain. Or shall I press the starter?”
Moddik stared at me, and suddenly he wasn’t the same. He looked portentous, somehow. Maybe his achievement had moved him.
“A moment,” he said. “Before we do anything, I’d like everybody to listen to something I have to say.”
Not one of us missed it. A sort of change in the air, like the change you finally come to recognize in the atmosphere before a sandstorm or before the great rains. In the absolute quiet I said:
“Moddik, has something grim happened? If it has, could you tell us quickly? Because perhaps every second counts.”
“Nothing grim,” said Moddik. “It may seem so, just for a split. But if we take it calmly, I think we can work it out.”
I was so tense, I jumped when Esten spoke.
“Do the water mixers actually work?”
“Oh, yes. They really are water mixers. Have you already guessed, Jang Esten, what I’ve been up to?”
“No. I’m not certain. You’d better tell us, anyhow.”
“Yes, you’d better,” said Kam from my right, “and fairly fast.”
13
That expression on Moddik’s face had an unpleasant familiarity. I couldn’t think what it reminded me of. He said:
“Here it is, then. In a nutshell, so to speak. The Committee in Four BEE has no personal grudge against any of you, contrary to what you rather egotistically surmise. The cause for their alarm is only that you may damage yourselves in some irreparable emotional fashion, and others also in more widespread and terrible ways. You are, though you may not properly comprehend the term, anarchists. As such, particularly considering the comparative strength of your numbers—or the strength which your members may eventually attain, since so many in the cities appear to sympathize and lean toward your mode of existence and your ideals—as such, I repeat, you are very, very dangerous. For your own sake and for the sake of those who may misguidedly follow you, you are asked to surrender to us, here and now, and return voluntarily to PD. No harm is offered you. Ultimately, we are acting in your own interests.”
“We?” I said. I’m not sure how I managed to say anything. “We?”
“I myself, Talsi, Glis,” he said. Talsi and Glis slipped out of our group and to his side. Then I recollected where I’d seen that look before. The Committee Hall.
“You’re Q-Rs—you’re androids,” I said.
Nilla screamed. Even in our extremity, I thought how typical of her that was.
“I thought you were too good to be true,” said Esten, “but I couldn’t work it out in time.”
“You were too intent on the seduction of your leader,” said Moddik.
“Yes,” I said, “and I on him. And Danor and Kam intent on each other and those fruits you so conveniently found over westward. And Nilla and her garden. And Felain wrapped up with Glis, and Loxi and Phy with Talsi. And Naz ecstasied up to his eyes. Beautifully staged, android. Just derisann, you Q-R turd. I should have got on to you earlier, shouldn’t I? Sampling that fruit in the saloon—so human of you, or were you testing it to see if we really could live on them? And that crap about stay-awake pills. You’ve never needed sleep in your short tubing-and-dial life. Oh, it’s too classic for words. Your plane even crashed, didn’t it? To make sure I wouldn’t turn you away? I’m aghast at your splendid acting. And so clever in overriding my block on the robots—I wondered how you did that. I wondered how you got the monitor computer to do exactly what you said, as well. I know now, don’t I? And all that pseudo-history you and those two there flashed about, your Jang circle two rorls back … you even knew Assule, of course, and said what a clot he was because you understood how I’d love it. How well they must have programmed you. Hey, Glis, you were right on, weren’t you? He really can understand the brain of a machine. He should, and so should you. You’re bloody all machines.”
“Not quite,” he said to me. “No life spark is required to create an android, since we are electronically motivated, but we are grown from cells and possess flesh as you do. Even if a few superior mechanisms do go into our life support. For example, Exile Jang, if I wished, I could pick up your sand-ship and carry it out across the dunes. Let me see you do it, life-spark human.”
I felt sick, partly because I’d liked him, trusted him, admired him. But also because it was finally out, the bare facts of their rivalry, what I had always instinctively felt. Programmed they might be to serve human needs, but in some hidden dark of their personae, they hated and despised us. Give them an excuse for retaliation, and they’d turn it on us like a gun. Dear God, what now?
“So what have you done, super-android?” I asked softly. “There’s got to be some threat hanging over us, hasn’t there? You k
now we wouldn’t buy your offer otherwise.”
“He’s rigged something,” Esten said. “The water mixers, probably.”
“No reason for you to hazard,” said Moddik and Q-R. “I’m going to tell you. It is the water mixers, also my workshop behind us by the grove of trees, also your robot Borss, currently in the sand-ship, also—must I enumerate further? I put the materials the Committee sent me to good use. The water mixers are particularly nice—real water-mixers that really work, except that at the moment they are mixing something else. Such a touch amused me. You see, we are capable of humor. A moment’s rewiring would alter them to their original purpose, of course, but none of you, I think, will be in a position to see to that.”
“Don’t dress it up,” said Kam. His voice was as soft as mine had been, as soft as Esten’s voice—as if we were similarly afraid to speak normally in case it precipitated the catastrophe. “What’s in the water mixers, the workshop, the robot—and everywhere else you’ve put your hands?”
“Bombs,” said the Q-R. “Each on its own big enough to throw this small area sky-high, and higher. Together, quite a pyrotechnic “display. Very little is going to be left of your plantation, or your ship. Or, my human friends, of you. Even if you start running now, you won’t outstrip the blast, and believe me the perimeter of such a shock is worse than the center.”
“He’s lying,” said Kam. “You’re lying. Activate, and you go, too. Don’t you?”
“Just so,” said the Q-R, “but I have no—er—soul. This thing that upsets you so much, this thing you call ‘death,’ is nothing to me. I shall have aided the Committee and mankind at large. The planes from Limbo will collect your remains and you will enter PD as planned. Everything will be as it should be.”
“Wait,” I said. “You can’t harm humanity, can you? Or did your programming slip?”
“Oh, no,” he said smiling. “I could plant the bombs, yes, since in their nonactive state they are harmless, and forever would be. I could not, however, depress a switch that would result in loss of human life—murder. But you see in Four BEE I was serviced in a slapdash fashion, deliberately, so that ultimately, at a moment that could be computed precisely, I should malfunction. And it is my malfunction which will activate the bombs, by means of the normal, upper-tonal malfunction alarm signals emitted from my inner circuitry. Do you understand? It’s rather neat. The Committee are responsible only for the error in my servicing, not for the bombs. I am responsible for placing the bombs, not for my malfunction. The right hand does not know what the left hand does, so neither hand is guilty. Two parts of a whole, independent of each other, yet they act perfectly as one. But I digress. Maybe I should explain that the moment of my malfunction is several splits in the past, and the signals are already being issued. It will take exactly twelve splits more for them to penetrate the casings of the explosive and trigger the vital nerve. After which there will be something of a bang.” He looked at me; his eyes danced, glinted, danced. “If all of you make a run for it, the Jang bird-plane in the grove of trees behind you will get you clear in time, even overloaded though the vehicle will be. I must point out, though, that its controls are set for Four BEE Limbo. The setting, by the way, is irreversible.”
