by Tanith Lee
So we went. Up Periot Waterway in an open boat, up the bright staircase, under the anemone opening and shutting on the porch. For the last time.
I was so drink-and-drug-sodden I didn’t know if I could actually do anything, but some of Four BEE’s pills are wonderful things, and paleness had touched the sky when we lay stilled and silent in each other’s arms. And I recalled that night so long ago when impotence had ravaged us, and it had mattered and meant so much.
Danor said quietly:
“I loved this time we’ve had. After Kam, it’s meant a lot to me. I’m only sorry, so sorry—”
“Don’t talk about it,” I said. “It’s nearly here.”
And then I fell asleep, abruptly, as if I could escape that way from what came closer with every split.
I was standing by the pet’s grave. My pet from all the vreks before. My pet who died on the shock wall the day after the great rains, when the desert blossomed. City robots from Limbo had buried it, at my request, out in the sands beyond the dome, because I couldn’t let them incinerate its white body, like a fall of snow, in some neat, hygienic pet cremator. I’d never known the site of the grave; I hadn’t gone with them. Yet here I was.
All around was desert and the dust wind softly blowing, but I scarcely noticed it yet. For on the grave sat the pet itself, washing with an infuriatingly thorough concentration. Then it looked up at me, a couple of its six white legs still hooked at amazing angles around its head, looked out of its orange eyes.
“You’re dead,” I said to the pet. “True death. Obliteration.”
“Certainly my body’s dead,” said the pet casually, “but whoever told you that everything else dies with it? What about that thing they use at Limbo, the thing the androids don’t have, the life spark, the soul? My, my, have you been led by the nose.”
Of course, the pet had never been able to talk—one of its virtues, maybe. It didn’t even seem to be talking now, yet somehow I heard the words, and imagined they came from it.
“Why am I here?” I asked.
“Why indeed? Obviously, you’d much rather stay in the city and get washed out, or whatever it is.”
“Oh, you’re wrong. I’m afraid to wake up, because then I have to go and let them do it.”
“Why do you? They’re only a bunch of dopey quasi-robots trying to work out all the answers, and getting tied up in their rewire circuits. As for you, have you forgotten everything?”
“How else could I get by, without making myself forget?” I said, and didn’t at first know what I meant.
“Finally you can only get by by letting yourself remember. Look.”
And we were up in a bird-plane, but it was open all around so you could see every way at once, and feel the scratchy wind and smell the sand and rock smell, and the smell of the wide sky.
Dark sky, even at noon, sky of an indigo greenness, sky with a blinding, scorching sun, a sun in space, not a mechanism revolving in a dome roof like a child’s toy. Below, the land, the pale dunes, the black mountains shaped like spears, like towers, like fortresses. On the horizon one volcano pouring its crimson plume into the air, fierce, uncompromising, and real. A wild land, a cruel land, a land to catch you out, bury you in sandstorm, broil you under the sun, freeze you under the stars, dehydrate and suffocate you in the heat with its low oxygen count. A land to thrill and humble you in that single unit after the rains, when all the barren sand is bright with green, and ferns spring toward the mountains and cover their flanks like a rolling ancient sea.
“Here I am!” shouted the desert, loud with life, for life there still was in it, waiting, stored, like seed. “Here I am. Did you forget me? Forget me despite your dreams of me, your dreams of the sun and the rain and the antique tribes who roamed me once with their herds and their weird ways? You, who moaned and whined, covering metal-tape with cries and yearning, you, you effete thalldrap? Now’s your chance to prove you can do more than sit on your tail complaining and drinking sapphire wine with your tears of self-pity. Come on, come and do battle with me, come and fight me. I’m more than a match for you. I’ll devour you if I can, but I’ll do it cleanly and openly, not with words and dark little tanks in Limbo. Don’t be afraid of human death and human age. I’ve seen it all, and I know it. It’s just dust blown over the rocks. Look at me, how dead and old I seem, and yet, watch me grow, watch me live. Come on. Come and find me. I’m waiting.”
“Pet,” I said, “I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Names,” said the pet. “Is that the only thing you care about?”
And it bit me hard, so hard I woke up with a shout.
10
I went into the foyer of the Committee Hall in Second Sector, and quite a big silent crowd was standing there, gawping. There were messenger bees too, and zoom-scanners zooming in from the nearest Flash Center, since I and my fate were exciting news, the first bit of drama for sixty rorls or whatever it was.
“Please follow me,” said a tactful Q-R. “I’m sure you’d prefer to do this in private.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll give my decision publicly, out here. After all, everybody’s so enthralled.”
It was a grandiose and gloomy occasion. The Q-R slowly went away, and presently the others from the Inquiry came shoveling out, led by the spokesman in gold.
I won’t say I wasn’t shaking all over, and I won’t, in fact, say any more about the state of my mind and my nerves, because they were fairly serious. But somewhere in me was a rod of steel to which I clung. I’d had a vision, as good as any vision given to any poet, sage, or prophet in the past. I wasn’t elated, I wasn’t confident even, but somehow, I knew, and with the end of doubt had come the death of despair.
“Fine,” I said, when I saw their depressed, executioners’ faces. “I hope everybody can hear me, and I hope the Flash Center is getting it too, because what I want to say is important, and it’s just about time someone did say it. I’m only embarrassed it took this pseudo-trial to push me into making a move.”
The Q-Rs began to look bothered. Was I going to create yet another disturbance? I went on fast, before they could start ordering sprays. “My decision is this: I’m heading into the desert.”
There was an interruption at this point. The crowd set up a lot of noise, even the Q-Rs seemed to be buzzing, in the region of their necks. Then everyone was saying shut up, shut up, to each other, since they could see I hadn’t finished. So I bowed, and continued:
“You think I’ve gone mad, and that’s probably a logical assumption on your part. I’m scared, I’ll admit, at what I’m going to do. But I tell you, we live here like a lot of embryos in a breeding tank. Every need is catered for. The Committee wipes our noses for us and picks us up when we fall down. Outside the domes we have a planet which actually belongs to us, and which half of us have never seen and would rather not see. I have seen it, and I like what I saw better than the sort of style and judgment you can see in Four BEE.” I looked at the Q-Rs. “So I’ve got the list of my requirements drawn up, and, brace yourselves, it’s a long one. And I’m ready, when you Q-R gentlemen are ready, to get down to it.”
The gold Q-R said extremely clearly, as if explaining to an imbecile: “We hope you have not been hasty. This is serious.”
“Don’t I know it. I told you, I’ve made my choice. If you think you have some damn right to give me an alternative like the alternative you gave me, I think I have a right to pick which course I accept. I’ll take the desert, and you can take Limbo PD and shove it right up your electronic valves.”
I felt I was unfair to those Q-Rs, who were blindly serving the community, or attempting to, as their programming ensured they must. But then, how could anyone ask me to be otherwise? Nobody expects the condemned to embrace the axe.
But nobody expected either, at least I don’t think they did (certainly I didn’t), the cheer that went belting up from the crowd in the Hall. Even the people cheering seemed unnerved. They were cheering me. Not so much for my spee
ch but for that very thing which so appalled them normally. Because I had defied the System, bitten again at the burning sun.
The cheers faded. A self-conscious void followed. Into the void, I spoke.
“Come on, then. Here’s my list, a whole boxload of it. Let’s not grak about.”
Part Two
1
I got a sand-ship off them, and it wasn’t easy.
If they exiled you to the desert, they reckoned they’d put up for you a nice little palace with every mod. con., and there you’d sit, vrek by vrek, staring up at the glassy ceiling, or down the vacuum drift or something, till boredom got the better of you, you selected a tasteful high window, and jumped out of it. I won’t say they definitely encouraged you to suicide and get everything over with quickly (and so back into PD in civilized fashion), but the idea that survival might be wrested from the situation, purpose even, was clearly indigestible to them.
What did I want a sand-ship for? To be mobile, to move about in? Well, yes. But—I reasoned—it would save them a bird-plane trip for me going from the dome, and it would also save them time, energy, and building materials. A sand-ship came ready-fitted, of necessity, with all life-support systems—oxygen pump, provision dispenser, water mixer, freezer storage, heat and cooler units, stabilizers (essential since about two-thirds of the desert is earthquake zone), defense mechanisms, even service and maintenance robots. And there must be surplus ships. How often did they run? And even when they did, they mostly ran passengerless, citizens who traveled preferring planes and sky-boats, which, they felt, kept them at a safer distance from the agoraphobic waste. Think, I kept saying, of the bother it would save the Committee if they just gave me a sand-ship. And, at last, they reluctantly responded.
Of course, I was acting on impulse merely. I’d been in a sand-ship before, twice, and seen what they had to offer, but their mobility did head my list of favorables. I had some mad notion of fizzing along the desert by day and night, the Outcast, a dangerous hazard to authorized traffic, shouting embittered songs at the sun and stars. My future seemed bleak, so I had clothed it in colorful hysteria; that way it was almost tolerable.
By the end of the fourth unit, I had to be out of the city. I hadn’t seen any “friends” since the party, nor Danor since our parting at dawn, when I had waked from the dream and wildly chittered my intentions in her ears. I was terrified she’d start trying to dissuade me—maybe succeed—but she only nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I think you’re right. Yes, yes. Go and tell them, ooma.” The last embrace was hurtful, and better undescribed. I wanted no one to see me off. So, from the moment I left home, I was entirely isolated, already exiled, though, what with the cheering crowd, and the Committee Hall and Limbo swirling with Q-Rs, I scarcely felt it. Then came the last journey across Four BEE to the dome lock.
I was female again by then, which, hormone-wise, no doubt made everything much worse. But I’d had to opt for a sex change—Hergal probably vibrated with glee when he heard. This was the final body I’d ever be allowed until my “natural death,” all of a rorl perhaps away. I was predominantly female, and I didn’t dare risk that fact catching up with me out alone in the wild when I could no longer alter things. Besides, I’d had a generous portion of masculinity, and should have sated that side for some while. I didn’t feel comfortable, though, being a girl again when really, under ordinary circumstances, I wasn’t ready to be. I kept forgetting my physiognomy was different, which was embarrassing enough, and, seeing myself in mirrors, was startled and demoralized, despite the beauty I’d ordered in Limbo as my right.
And I was very beautiful. It was the most beautiful body I’d ever designed. I was going to have to live with it, literally, and watch it, too, decaying. It was, therefore, the sort of loveliness which is not perfect, but draws its charm from a measure of imbalance, which can accommodate flaws and make little of them, for a while at least. A slim, agile body for traversing harsh regions, excellent muscle tone, long legs, long fingers, breasts not too large—able to resist the sag that would come with vreks of gravity. Good bone structure in a face light and versatile, to hold that smooth flesh taut to the bitter (how bitter?) end. Oh, yes, I’d thought of everything, hadn’t I? For, reading in the History Tower, I had learned fully of the myth of Old Age and the roads whereby it traveled.
My skin was tawny-tan to complement and survive the lashes of the sun, my hair one shade fairer than my skin, straight and bright as a tan flame. The poet’s eyes I kept, the large blue opals with their shadowy rims. At least I could recognize their glances in the ambushing mirrors of the city I was leaving forever.
The bird-plane was anonymous. Two Q-Rs rode with me, innocuous guards.
I had never felt much for Four BEE beyond a kind of contemptuous familiarity. Now it didn’t look dear to me, or precious, yet so known and so secure. Never again will I ride on Peridot Waterway, never again watch the tragic dragon spray its green fire before Jade Tower, never again wander the movi-rails beneath the artificial stars, or drink snow-in-gold at Blue Sky, or lie with some lover in the plastic-cloud floaters, or …
The poet’s eyes were weeping down my girl-stranger’s face, and with my unknown tawny slender hands I made obscure crushing gestures, as if it were my emotion I tried to crush.
At the lock, somehow, there was no crowd. Obviously secrecy and intrigue had been perpetrated to mislead the populace.
The sand-ship stood waiting there. I stared at it with icy fear, as if it threatened me, this thing which was to be my home.
Every scrap of my belligerence and my defiance had gone. The dream was insubstantial as smoke. I wanted to beg them to let me stay, but I knew they never would, so somehow kept my mouth shut.
They escorted me into the ship, my two Q-Rs. The robots were already busy here and there; the automatic motors were humming to be off. I didn’t have to drive or navigate myself, of course. It would do everything itself, to my specifications. It wasn’t a big ship, but pretty big for me. The Q-Rs showed me the monitor beam they’d put in, the thing I could use to signal the city for extra supplies or medical help. It would relay through a computer, naturally, and be very efficient, and that meant that, even in this way, I couldn’t communicate with another human being. While I was myself, I would never hear a real human voice again. And, though I might see the bird-planes pass over, or distant sister ships go gliding by along the horizon of the dunes, never again would I see a real human face.
“All right,” I said to the Q-Rs. “I understand where everything is.” I hadn’t had to pay for anything; I wouldn’t ever have to pay from here on. One advantage of exile. I wiped the tears from my cheeks and glared my escort out. “Now, get off my ship.”
They went immediately, and once the doors had shut, I flipped the switch for automatic drive.
The window-spaces were covered, but shortly there came the bang of the dome locks, closing behind me for the ultimate time.
I sat very still and very stiff upon the velvet seat, feeling the unseen desert clasp me round.
Alone at last.
2
How many times in the city I had longed for privacy, sought and won privacy, and sighed with relief. Privacy is a pleasant thing when crowds surge below and friends hammer, unheard, at the porch signal.
I got up eventually, and went about the ship. It thought for itself, and had no need of my supervision. Steady on its air cushions, it would swoop to port or starboard to avoid rocks or faults or exploding volcanoes. Clever ship. I could foretell I might begin to talk to it sooner or later, call it by a pet name; talk to the robots too, probably, program them to carry out inane tape-voice calls and motions of recognition when they saw me. No doubt I should murmur endearments to the love machine, pretend it was Danor, Lorun, Hergal … Oh, I could see everything before me, like pictures painted on my mind.
I chose a sleeping place, one of the several cabins the ship possessed. It was done up in cream and blue.
At least there’d be Picture-Vis
ion, human bodies on perma-celluloid for me to watch. Song tracks to play and moving-picture magazines too, in the ship’s store. And after all, ecstasy in abundance. If I planned it carefully, I could stay ecstatic for ten units at a time before I had to give it a rest. Because, even then, I knew I wasn’t going to suicide. Oh no. However bad it got (and it was going to get bad, wasn’t it?) I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
I sat an hour or so in the pale-gold saloon under the chandelier, before a delicious untasted repast the robots had served. I’d already inspected the automatic food and water machines, marveling aloud, until I caught myself, on their intricate, self-maintaining activities.
The ship was still running, north, east, west, south—or in a circle—what did it matter? Solar battery by day, friction circuits by night, or during recharging. You could hear the systems change over, one to the other, if you listened hard.
I took a robot into one of the game rooms, and we played star-ball for a while, but I missed the bad language and the sulking or spiteful victory noises of a human opponent. Even when the ball went smack into the robot’s faceplate, never a word. Just imagine Hergal—no, don’t do that. Don’t imagine anyone.
All this while, there had been one small part of me I had managed to keep hidden. The part which was thinking of the desert everywhere around. On my first sand-ship journey, I had run to the Transparency Tower in the stern to observe the landscape, and gone into euphorics over it. Now I wouldn’t go there. I was afraid. Afraid to see and afraid to confront my reaction to seeing. As soon as I understood this, the evasion began to prey on me.
Nibble, nibble. Cowardice becomes you, ooma.
Go on, go on, get up and look.
’Fraid to face the nasty-wasty waste.
Nag, nag, nag.
At length I rose, girded my loins, so to speak, and skulked down the corridor.