by Tanith Lee
“If you want me to stay, I’ll stay. But there’s one thing we’d better have clear from here on. I’m not Hergal.”
I gazed at him, and wildly verbalized a list of males who at one era or another had been close: Drar? Rannik? Lorun?
“No,” he said. He looked at me and then he told me.
And I didn’t believe him.
“Twelve vreks back,” he said, “that was the last time you ever really registered me, and not surprising. I couldn’t express myself then, particularly not to you. You were like a wall of solid glowing metal. When I was with you, the heat and the brightness shriveled me up. I became all the things you hated most in sheer self-defense. I couldn’t say a sentence to you that didn’t sound as though it had come out of a rusty mincer. In the end, I instigated for myself a sort of game. I knew you expected me to be a dull, reactionary, clod-hopping lump, with a ragbag of platitudes in place of a brain—a kind of faithful promok, who’d dog your footsteps, and creep away when you got bored. Because I could never manage to put over my true thoughts against that glowing wall of indifference, I just used to act out the part you’d allotted me. I’d shamble up looking like Monster-Night, and say: ‘Onk, it’s not ethical, but I mustn’t grumble,’ and blink a couple of my eyes at you, and I could see the circuits engaging in your mind, the right patterns being achieved. A sort of neon sign would light up in your face: Here comes that bloody silly cunt, Hatta. Of course, this was not the way to deal with you, but I’m a defensive man, oversensitive. I can’t help it, I need a shell. I got a rather bitter and depressing laugh at the way you had me so wrong every time, and I played up to it. I could tell myself: She doesn’t understand me because now I won’t let her see me.
“Then they chucked you out of Four BEE, and that was it. I knew I’d got to come after you because you were the only thing that gave any value to my life. I’d been too nervous, too scared before to run on your road. The only time I’d ever put myself on the level, you’d smashed my ego down my throat. But out here there wasn’t any other way. Being a monster freak has compensations, but not when there’s nothing else you can be.
“To begin with, I had a spell of being female. I was trying to find out something about you, to get over the thing that scared me in you. And I succeeded. It was a kind of therapy I thought might work, and it did. Being a girl is not for me. I’m eighty percent masculine, and stuck with it. But I found out what makes the clock tick, and high time. To nick your last male body was pure inspiration. Very disturbing it was, I might add. More for me, perhaps, than for you when you initially saw me. That was the first time, or almost the first time I’d ever had you at a disadvantage. No neon came up on this occasion. You were just completely nonplussed, standing out there in the glamorous remains of that jewelry dress, staring up at me. I’d tried to acquire your manner, your extrovert qualities, in order to deceive you. The strange thing is that I took to them quite easily, once I’d got over the fear of being in the open, not hiding behind six red eyes and eight legs.”
His gaze never left my face while he said this. When he stopped, I said:
“Well, it looks rather as if the only one of us two who’s a right floop is me.”
He said, “Now you know who I am, do you still want me to stay?”
“Hatta—” I began, but he said:
“No, Esten. Let’s keep that the way it is. Hatta is past tense.”
“All right, Esten, then. You used to say, when you were Hatta the Horror, that you loved me.”
“Unchanged,” he said. “That’s what it’s about.”
“Well—Esten—I don’t know if I love you. But if you leave me, a bit of me will go with you. Maybe it’s just the clever trick you devised, but you really do seem like a part of me, myself. And I’ve got your seed in me, growing, and I want that child, and I want you. What more can I say?”
“Knowing you,” he said, “bloody plenty.”
Epilogue
So we sit here on the veranda, Danor and I, like two fecund Gray-Eyeses. In our condition we’re obviously too far gone to do much hoeing or digging. In fact I doubt if we could see over ourselves to the hoe.
Danor found out she too had doubled her ego-count some days after I did, but she didn’t appear to mind. She looks sweetly lovely and positively scintillates with health, as I do. I suppose it’s lucky for us the cities make such first-class body structures. Giving birth with only the knowledge you get from a machine and its library, and no experienced help beyond what a couple of pale and terrified males can offer, is a prospect not without its soul-destroying aspect, but I think we are perfectly built enough that we can cope, and anyhow we’ll have to, pangs of cowardice or not. And who cares? It’s going to be worth it.
“Mine will be male,” says Danor. I surmise she wants to replace Kam’s unloving child in BAA. But how can we know what sex our brats will be? A random life this is going to prove, all told.
We’ve had no more trouble from the cities, despite a sort of alarm system we arranged, to spot enemy planes and so forth. But so far, over the past vrek and a half, twenty new arrivals, each checked out as human, have appeared on the scene—only six of them females, which may create extra difficulties later, and I almost wish we had that android bitch Talsi around. They descend in stolen aircraft, stolen sky-boats … Three hijacked a sand-ship and five of the passengers elected to come with them when they saw the valley. They work very hard, though all at various things. We’re starting to be able to recognize our own different talents, and channel them. For example, we have four terrific cooks, who can do wonders with the provision-dispenser goo (yes, we’re on goo, and checked goo, at that) and even better wonders with the natural food. Fortunately others have robot and mechanic skills, not like Moddik, but then that’s hardly surprising. With their help we’ve got a complete housing plan on the way, not to mention a reliable contraceptive for those girls who don’t want to end up as Danor and I have done, while still enjoying the home-grown edibles. Plus a valley-wide discerning shock wall, almost complete, that discriminates between animals, humans, and androids.
Moddik’s eleven remaining water mixers—safely rewired by clever Esten, who read about such things where I absorbed poetry in the History Tower—proudly prowl the Garden in the steps of that mother-of-pearl giant who came first. Except that they go much farther, to the edges of the dunes, in fact. Which is why the valley is green from rim to rim. Green, even over there, where the black crater left by Moddik’s last bomb has healed with grass, like a symbol of all healing, of the body, the mind, the heart.
Sitting here, looking out across that landscape of small white homes, half built, the columns of trees, the different-colored lawns and slopes scattered with broken panes of shade and sun; smelling too the perfume that flows off the earth and the flowers, the city I came from seems unreal and forever silenced. Against the stature of those black mountains, against the vault of that blazing sky flashing back at itself like blue-green mirror from the canals, against the music of life, the animal cries, the insects, the din of humans working or arguing or making love or singing out there under the green shadows, it’s not only Danor’s womb and mine that seem quickened, but the whole defiant womb of our world.
Presently Nilla and Felain will be back from the carving they’ve started out there in the forest. These two at least won’t need the contraceptive, being content with each other for the time being—to the great sorrow of several males. One artistic young man has already painted them as an Idyll. I think he’s planning to have a go at Danor and me next as two pregnant tribal princesses. Hmm. Naz is raising some sort of corn over on the west side. He’s very enthusiastic about it. Phy and Loxi are somewhere with two girls. In their spare moments they’ve commenced a hive for the insects, which apparently will make honey. (Sometime.) Esten’s dragon has been harnessed to an old-fashioned robot-built plow, and doesn’t like it too much. As for my inter-animal-android theories, the swan has been adopted by a family of snakes, and lives with
them. Their fur makes it sneeze, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
Kam will also be home soon. He’ll put his arm around Danor as if she’s marked HANDLE WITH EXTREME CAUTION, but she’ll make him forget that later, in their cabin. Esten will be next, the color of mahogany, coming up from the forest. From the left he will look like a poet, or a young primitive deity out of the glades. From the right you will see the half-mask of polarized satin.
And when I think now how I almost quoted, not realizing, his own words of so long ago back at him, that day I made him stay alive with me—how the body was a joke, that it was the inner something which mattered … well, I’ve learned your new name, Esten, and I’ve learned that if I love anybody, yours is the name he gave himself.
Pet, do you hear it, my white pet, buried somewhere out there, over the mountains, under the sand? Do you hear the noise we’re making?
The grapes should be harvested soon, and prepared in the ancient fashion. Perhaps I should send a flask of our vintage to Four BEE, with our compliments.
However nasty a drink it turns out, it’s going to be better than their lousy sapphire wine.
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Also By Tanith Lee
Birthgrave
The Birthgrave (1975)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1977) (aka Shadowfire)
Quest for the White Witch (1978)
Novels Of Vis
The Storm Lord (1976)
Anackire (1983)
The White Serpent (1988)
Four-BEE
Don’t Bite the Sun (1976)
Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977)
Silver Metal Lover
The Silver Metal Lover (1981)
Metallic Love (2005)
Tanaquil
Black Unicorn (1989)
Gold Unicorn (1994)
Red Unicorn (1997)
Blood Opera
Dark Dance (1992)
Personal Darkness (1993)
Darkness, I (1994)
Lionwolf
Cast a Bright Shadow (2004)
Here in Cold Hell (2005)
No Flame But Mine (2007)
Other Novels
Volkhavaar (1977)
Electric Forest (1979)
Day by Night (1980)
Lycanthia (1981) (aka The Children of Wolves)
Sung in Shadow (1983)
Days of Grass (1985)
A Heroine of the World (1989)
The Blood of Roses (1990)
Heart-Beast (1992)
Elephantasm (1993)
Eva Fairdeath (1994)
Vivia (1995)
When the Lights Go Out (1995)
Reigning Cats and Dogs (1995)
White as Snow (2000)
L’Amber (2006)
Greyglass (2011)
Collections
Cyrion (1982)
Tamastara (1984) (aka The Indian Nights)
The Gorgon: And Other Beastly Tales (1985)
Women as Demons (1985)
Dreams of Dark and Light (1986)
Forests of the Night (1989)
Nightshades: Thirteen Journeys into Shadow (1993)
Glossary of Conventions, Institutions, and Devices
android See Q-R.
bee (baa, boo) A kind of electronic, self-carrying “handbag” used by both sexes. It can contain anything from a bottle of wine to a full-length mirror; and will also run errands and carry messages. In Four BEE these things are known as bees, in Four BAA as baas, in Four BOO as boos.
body change and sex change The essential element—“life spark” or consciousness—can be taken from one body and replaced in another fresh body, specifically designed by the prospective occupant, via the Limbo Tub at Limbo. The chosen body may be either male or female, depending on the mood of the human concerned. In the earlier part of the autobiography the writer stated that the time supposed to elapse between each body replacement was officially thirty units, but this limit was constantly abused by suiciders.
circle Jang custom: A circle is a group of friends who more or less stick together as a clique, and are reckoned to do most things as one. Admitting fresh members to the circle is a complex ritual, although not mentioned by the writer. Cutting original members out, however, is easy, and the outcast is traditionally expected to dissolve in tears.
displacement machine Originally intended for human travel, on the disintegration-reintegration principle, it proved unpopular, since the process tended to make the passengers vomit—according to the writer.
Dream Rooms The place where citizens can buy and experience dreams previously designed and plotted by themselves—a kind of cerebral Adventure Palace.
flashes News bulletins, appearing as electrically projected signs in the sky, on walls, etc. They can also be picked up in the home. Nothing much ever appears to happen in the cities, so anything even slightly unusual is worth reporting on, and zoom-scanners and Flash Center bees are constantly on the alert. There is a Flash Center in each of the four sectors of each of the cities.
Four BEE, Four BAA, Four BOO The three great dome cities. Obviously in size gargantuan, they exist beneath stabilized electricity wave shields—the domes—which protect them from all the hazards of the planet, eruption, storm, earthquake, and so on. Entirely self-sufficient, their inner conditions are made as “natural” as possible, complete with parks and gardens, days and nights, artificial sun, moon, and stars. Outside Four BAA are the lesser domes which contain the breeding-tank farms for the creation of Q-Rs and also glamorous android animals made to delight the populace. Four BOO is famous for the trapping of real desert animals—for pets—and additionally, in point of fact, for fur: and other animal products such as scent.
hypno-school First active stage of city life, where children are taught incredibly sophisticated items, such as extraordinary forms of mathematics, for which apparently they never find any use afterward. Teaching by hypnosis leaves most of the school activity a complete blank in the child’s mind, though knowledge is retained. This phase only lasts one-twentieth of a rorl (about five years).
Jang Second stage of city life. Adolescence has become a compulsory part of growing up, lasting anything up to half a rorl or longer, and is called Jang. Jang have their own customs, culture, traditional modes of behavior (having ecstasy, marriage, etc.), and virtually their own language (Jang slang). Any who depart from the norm are frowned on by all strata of society.
makers Parents. Relevant cells are taken from a male and a female who wish to become makers, and joined in a crystallize tank to make a child. This is supposed to create a bond between the two makers, but evidently rarely does for long. Only one maker is obliged to remain as the child’s guardian, and then actually only until hypno-school is finished.
marriage Jang custom. Jang traditionally always marry before “having love”—the sexual act. Sometimes they marry for a substantial period of time—a vrek, mid-vrek, etc.—sometimes only for an afternoon or unit, in which case the marriage must be paid for both before and after. The marriage “ceremony” consists mainly of one speech, as follows: “I promise to have love with you and no other for the period aforesaid, unless I seek annulment, which may be granted on alternate units throughout the marriage, and which must be paid for.” Older People are not required to marry.
Older People Final and longest stage of city life, which can continue more or less indefinitely, until the person concerned, worn out with living and memories, voluntarily seeks Personality Dissolution, in which his current ego is erased and his conscious mind washed clean of all recollection. After this he returns to the child stage once more, this time with a Q-R gu
ardian.
paying There is no monetary system in Four BEE, etc. However, since the cities run on power, emotional energy is taken from the payer and fed into the city power banks. The weird process is accomplished simply by the purchaser entering a pay-booth and going into a hysteria of thank-yous. Ecstasy or other drug stimulants are generally used to ensure the success of this peculiar rite.
Picture-Vision A sort of nonstop TV extravaganza of beauty and eroticism, with no story line.
Q-R Quasi-robot, or android. Grown in the breeding tanks at BAA, from chemical cells, the Q-R externally resembles a human. Useful circuitry is built into them, however, and even their “blood” is a form of self-servicing metallic plasma. Not being created from male and female tissue and therefore without a consciousness—or life spark—the Q-Rs are brought to life by an electric charge of colossal force.
sabotage Is carried out by Jang, and is another, though unofficial, Jang custom. It entails breaking into the lookout posts of the cities, damaging the machinery, and thereby disturbing the protective waves of the dome long enough to allow in bad weather, or worse. The dome defenses quickly block the sabotage, and harm of any telling proportion is never done.
suiciding Literally suiciding—killing the body—but without the normal connotations, since it is only a means to get an off-the-cuff body replacement inside the thirty-unit limit. Limbo robots immediately home in on any suicide or death, and take the “victim” to Limbo, where they rescue the life spark and replace it in flesh.
Tanith Lee (1947-2015)
Tanith Lee was born in London in 1947. She is the author of more than 70 novels and almost 300 short stories, and has also written radio plays for the BBC and two scripts for the cult television series Blake’s 7. Her first short story, ‘Eustace’, was published in 1968, and her first children’s novel The Dragon Hoard was published in 1971. In 1975 her adult fantasy epic The Birthgrave was published to international acclaim, and Lee maintained a prolific output in popular genre writing throughout her life. She twice won the World Fantasy Award, and was a Guest of Honour at numerous science fiction and fantasy conventions including the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa, Canada. In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious title of Grand Master of Horror, and in 2013 she was given the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Tanith Lee was married to author and artist John Kaiine. She died in May, 2015.
