by Tanith Lee
“Here, Gray-Eyes,” I yodeled. “Come and have your lovely seventh meal!”
Gray-Eyes, you bet, was intending to do just that, and came racing from the rosy dusk. However, no platter lay in the sand. I had the platter, I, Gray-Eyes’ wicked step-maker.
Emitting encouraging noises, I held the plate in Gray-Eyes’ direction. Probably the rotten little floop would take to its heels. But no.
Gray-Eyes stole toward me with a sidling, anxious motion. “I know you’ll slay me,” its tragic gazes said. “But I’ve no choice since the skin is sticking to my ribs.” Some ribs. It was already so fat it could hardly walk. I would have to diet the poor thing later or it would go off bang. Maybe the provision machine could rustle up some starch-reduced kidney-rissoles?
Now Gray-Eyes was on the veranda.
I backed, very slowly, into the ship, and set the plate down on the floor of the open general area beyond, between the steel pillars. Then I sat stealthily on a velvet seat, my hand on the switch which would shut the doors.
Gray-Eyes entered the ship with a look of unconcern and indifference. Obviously, Gray-Eyes fought dragons and conquered citadels in its spare moments, I was the only thing which gave it nightmares.
Gray-Eyes reached the plate and fell to.
Then conscience smote me. With the ultimate power of capture in my grasp, I felt a positive slime-crawler, and took my hand off the switch. Oh, let the animal go free. I pictured it, a prisoner, sodden with fear, huddled pathetically under a table in the saloon, refusing to eat, refusing to move, pining away. My, my, was I in for a lesson.
Presently, seventh meal decimated, Gray-Eyes stationed itself, legs straddled on the mosiac, and began its washing procedure. However, the rite seemed rather shorter than usual, and was soon concluded. Next, Gray-Eyes rose, and glanced about for the first time.
Its eyes frequently goggled, thus it was hard to be sure if it were as genuinely madly interested as it now looked. But, after a brief sniff about, still goggling, it turned and headed for the interior of the ship, and my mood jumped a notch or so. Being very slow and careful, so as not to cause panic, I crept after.
Then Gray-Eyes reached the saloon.
And then it started.
A robot was laying seventh meal for me at the center table, and very nice it looked. Jeweled plates, crystal goblets. The glitter perhaps attracted Gray-Eyes, or the possibility of further refreshment. Whatever it was, Gray-Eyes proved an opportunist.
The plates went one way, goblets the other, and the silver placemats discussed in four directions. One caught the robot in the thorax region, and presumably activated some metaphysical theory that if there was trouble, the robot was going to deal with it. It lunged about, registered the position of Gray-Eyes—currently unsuccessfully champing a fork on the rugs—and made a grab. Gray-Eyes spat out the fork, which shot into the table leg, and went into its threat-display, naturally to no avail. So it bounded for the wall drapes and ripped its way up them, and onto the latticework ceiling, and inevitably reached the large, decorative chandelier, which depended, glowing with chemical fire, above us.
“No, Gray-Eyes,” I cried. “Naughty.”
I’d always liked the chandeliers on the ships, but not now that this one was swaying in vast donging arcs, fortunately non-hot flames hailing on the robot and me and everything else, Gray-Eyes slithering and scrabbling at the center.
“Come down, Gray-Eyes,” I entreated.
I pushed the robot to a spot where it could catch the flailing lemon bundle, but Gray-Eyes studiously avoided us, and toppled instead, frantically clawing, down a fresh lot of draperies, landing at the archway where the robot-kitchen lies, tastefully hidden behind crystallize automatic doors.
“No!” I yelled.
Even the robot made a noise—involuntarily, I think, some overstrained joint protesting.
But it was no good. Trailing clawfuls of shredded curtain and faintly shining with droplets of chemical fire, Gray-Eyes sped with hurricane force at the doors, which obligingly automatically opened, and vanished into the metallic jungle beyond. After which the doors jammed.
Some of the vandalized satin-of-gold had got caught between them, no doubt, hence the difficulty, but the reasons for the fault were my last worry. I shouted useless orders at the meal-robot and at the other robot that had come thudding in to help. They were trying to bash the doors down, unaccustomed to such catastrophes, and over their racket I could hear the sound of metal racks going over and ball-bearings or something rolling, and something else rolling, which was probably Gray-Eyes, and then a most terrifying silence.
Just at that split the doors unjammed abruptly and both robots fell through into the kitchen. I didn’t stop to pick them up as they lay there threshing feebly among the steaming debris of Gray-Eyes’ passage. Gray-Eyes itself stood precariously poised, with noncommittal lethargy, upon the brink of the chute which passes down into the bowels of the provision-dispenser.
I took the kitchen in one leap, but wasn’t quick enough. With a nonchalant yawn, Gray-Eyes slithered from sight.
Down in there a whirlpool of—what? I didn’t know, but my mind’s eye supplied an amalgam of steel cleavers, pulverizers, mincers, pestles and mortars. Wailing, I flung myself upon the machinery. There was a little button, I’d seen it before, a little black button with an enormous red message printed over it:
TO HALT MECHANISM, DEPRESS ONCE.
WARNING! USE ONLY IN EXTREME EMERGENCY.
I stabbed at the button with both hands, and next instant the world went mad.
First off, the machine regurgitated Gray-Eyes at about eighty knots and covered with this evening’s proposed menu—cactus-pineapple, cheesecake, the lot. This object, propelled through the kitchen doors, which had jammed open now, thonked to earth out of sight, and made its departure, stickily and fast (as I later deduced from pineapply pawmarks on the rock outside).
Post Gray-Eyes, there erupted from the provision dispenser about a hundred miles of leather-of-steel moving belt, plus a gallon or two of cold soup which promptly flooded the kitchen area and washed through into the saloon and beyond with liberated gurglings. This, however, was a mere divertissement compared to what followed.
Scarcely had I time to curse than an explosion cursed louder, from the guts of the ship where the lower tubing of the dispenser shared bow-storage space with the tanks of the water mixer. The whole ship, taking umbrage, bucked and writhed and seemed about to turn turtle.
Things previously undamaged rained about my ears; worse than earthquake, the floor wriggled queasily. Rugs, robots, furnishings, and I floundered among the heaving soup.
Then nemesis. A great whoosh, a wave of heat and a wave of cold, the ominous grumble of some force restrained—followed by the splintering roar of restraint collapsing. Last, a bang to end all bangs as part of the roof of the sand-ship ejected into the night, oxygen compression whistled away, and a jet of combined semi-synthesized food and ready-mixed water arrowed northward at the stars, missed them, and crashed spent upon the recumbent desert.
5
“Help!” I screamed into the monitor beam. “Help! Help!”
Far off in Four BEE sleeping circuits presumably engaged, and the link awoke. A crisp sizzling on the frequency, followed by the cool, stern voice of the computer, interrogating me across the miles.
“What is it that you need?”
It was no good trying to be prosiac, up to my knees in soup with half the ship gone and half the alarms of the ship going off all about me, quite pointlessly, I might add.
“Need? Need? Can’t you hear?”
“I can hear perfectly. What is it that you need?”
“Help. I told you.”
“Help of what kind?”
“A couple of crates of roofing, a new provision dispenser, and—oh, dammit—a deaf-aid if this bloody row keeps up.”
Clicks and whirrs greeted my gospel.
“I am afraid we are not quite clear as to the nature of you
r request.”
“Listen, fool,” I raged, “turn your recorder tapes on and record this. A desert animal fell down the chute of the provision dispenser and when I turned it off—the dispenser—something went zaradann and it’s blown a hole in the bow of the ship. The oxygen is still pumping, but the concentration is none, since it’s all leaking out of the roof—the hole I mentioned. And I’ve got a thirty-foot water-and-food spout from the explosion, which I assume means both the provision dispenser and the water mixer are totally grakked. And, as they’re in the bow, that may also mean the drive motors are grakked up too. Thus, if you don’t offer a friendly hand fairly quick I’m going to perish of starvation, dehydration, and oxygen deficiency. While static. What have you got to say to that?”
“Where is the desert animal?” asked the monitor computer.
That surprised me. Maybe it had my files in its little brain-cupboard, or perhaps curiosity had overcome its reflexes.
“The desert animal has fled to its burrow covered in cheesecake,” I said.
The computer ticked and tocked away. Reasonably, it inquired: “Your other option is still open. Do you wish to suicide and return to PD?”
“And save you the trouble of rescuing me? No, I don’t. Just you tell those Q-Rs to keep their side of the bargain and get off their—”
“Here is an emergency robot-activator. Are your robots standing by?”
My three robots were actually still splashing around on the floor, but I thought they’d pick it up, so I said yes, and the code came through, all squeaks, howls, and honkings, which, coupled with the sirens and buzzers and warning bells, nearly reduced me to a permanent audiophobe.
However, it worked. About ten splits later the robots, reprogrammed to operate at maximum efficiency and with specialized orders to deal with the disaster, were pounding from stem to stern of the ship, setting everything to rights. Even the alarms were gradually turned off, and the soup began to withdraw its hold, leaving only a stray lentil, artistically draped.
“We have located your position, and an automatic high-speed repair bird-plane should reach you in one unit’s time. You are advised to be alert for it. Till then, the robots have received instructions in the matter of food and water rationing and the temporary sealing of the ship. Defense and other mechanisms should work as per normal.” There was then the slightest pause, after which the computer added: “We trust such an event will not be repeated. Desert animals should not be allowed aboard your ship.”
“Balls.”
6
An entrancing night.
An extra oxygen pill to be taken, which I was sure I didn’t need, but it was robot’s orders, and a temperature stabilizer installed in my cabin which hummed jauntily to itself. The pill made me lively even though I felt enervated, so I couldn’t sleep. The stabilizer noise didn’t help either, or the robots thudding and bonking about on the roof. They’d managed to stop the water jet, after a couple of hours.
The soup smell was evaporating, but not fast enough for the cleaning machines, which burst from the walls at irregular intervals and sprayed the ship with scented deodorant, and stuffed rags and itty disinfected brooms into every crevice. I began to prefer the smell of soup. At least it was quiet.
Finally I took refuge in the Transparency Tower, which, temperature unstabilized, was now freezing. But it was as far from the din as I could get. I glared out at the desert, wondering where Gray-Eyes was now. Probably licking itself silly getting off the cheesecake, maybe with a few friends in to help, telling them about the ogress in the funny moving house who had chucked our hero (heroine?) in a mincer, from whence it had only escaped by means of its cunning and gallantry. Doubtless it would be back anon with a hungry look, and then I was going to get a stacked plate of something and throw it right in its face.
Frankly, I thought the sand-ship the Committee had so generously given me had gone a bit to seed, for I’m sure others have had occasion to stop provision dispensers now and then, without such dire results. So, if they’d palmed me off with shoddy goods, serve them right that they’d have to send me succor all across the burning waste.
In the end I fell asleep in the chair in the tower, and had some exhausting overoxygenated dreams. In one, the sky was raining robot planes, each of which landed with a shattering bang. In another, a beautiful male emerged from the desert, a male from one of the old tribes, bronze skin and midnight hair, and swooned away at my feet with a piteous cry for water. And I, a calculating gleam in my eye, ran to get the aforesaid water, and of course the water mixer had exploded and there wasn’t any. I was trying to force anti-dehydration pills between the unfortunate devil’s tightly clenched and scowling teeth when the desert sun came up and woke me. And two seconds after the light touched my face, the Transparency Tower frantically opaqued, so I shouldn’t see the frightening dawn. Though it was still there, outside; waiting for me? Well, at least there is always that, I reasoned sentimentally.
Fair dawn, always fair, so red, so emerald, so golden, bathing the sky behind the jagged silhouettes of the eastern mountains, and the peak I called the Cup looking just like a cup with pink Joyousness-type bubbly-clouds swimming over it.
So, without stopping to tidy up or go and inspect what the robots had achieved, for their dramatic hammering had ceased, I plodded to the outer doors, opened them, and went out to greet the morning.
The sun was already shining on my porch; below the rocks the unbroken sand looked like a carpet of pale jewels, except, I hazarded, bow-wards on the other side of the ship, where the spout of part-food, part-liquid had fallen yesterday.
The revolting fountain had angled northwest, and I couldn’t see the disaster area from my southeastern veranda, for which I was thankful. I was staring up into the flaring sky, wondering if the super-fast robot plane might be early, when the revelation came to me.
It came coiling about the side of the ship, born on the dawn wind. It came like a rope of silver on the air. Green-silver. For a second I was dumbfounded, trying to place that unique and magic scent. Then I knew.
I tore around the ship, narrowly avoiding collision with a placidly ambling robot still intent on repairs. Tore round, and pulled up too fast and fell prone. Which was quite appropriate, for among the extinct nomadic tribes the prone position was the one in which they worshipped their gods.
The deluge of mixed water and semi-made food had covered about half a square mile of dunes. It hadn’t lasted very long, maybe three hours all told. The rains, of course, which come only once in every three hundred days, and not even then necessarily, do at least last a whole glorious diluvian night. After the rains you could understand, even if you marveled at it, the extraordinary reply of the desert. But this.
Green shoots blowing like fine green hair before that morning wind. Green shoots thickly massed over half a square mile, like slender soldiery in some fable. And the scent of them, the smell of their sap, and the oxygen they expired. Some in bloom—little flowers or buds that might turn out to be anything, except that there wouldn’t be time. The generating life of the sands, dormant, brought to fruit prematurely and by accident. And in an hour or so the sun would be draining the soul from them. By sunset they would be black and withered in this waterless place. By dawn tomorrow you could safely offer a prize to anyone able to detect their ruined dust among the other dusts of the land.
I stood and swore. I felt I had betrayed those shoots, dragged them up here on false pretenses without even a night of rain to sustain them, sold them out to the cruel sun. Dawn, farathooming dawn.
As I snarled there, along came a conscientious robot with a tray, and on the tray one meal injection (large), one draught of silver-cordial (small), six anti-dehydration tablets, four oxygen pills, and a lot of space.
“How groshing,” I remarked, knocking things back, and shooting things into myself ferociously. I balked only at the oxygen. “Look at that field out there; I’m not going to need these things. At least, not all of them.” The robot
whirred worriedly, and went into a tape-monologue-dehumanized voice stressing rather than alleviating solitude—about how I must take all the pills, all the pills. So I had to reprogram it quickly in the interests of peace.
When it had gone, I sat on the already hot rock, digesting my horrible first meal, and staring at the greenery. The idea arrived presently and was perfectly simple. No doubt anyone else would have thought of it eighty vreks before I did.
“Hallo there, it’s me again,” I informed the monitor computer jollily.
Quite probably it blew a steel gasket. It sounded like it.
“Wait. Wait,” it chuntered out, and a wild rattling broke loose for a whole split before it had calmed itself down, or been calmed. Then: “There is no need to panic,” it said. “The repair bird-plane is on its way, and will reach you at—click—click—computed time of desert sunset.”
“Who’s panicking?” I gravely asked, hoping it would get the point that of the two of us, it was. “I opened the link because I have another request.”
“No other requests are acceptable until the first request has been granted.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Suppose I’d broken a femur?”
“They are extinct,” said the computer, either mishearing or, lacking certain vocabulary, making an uneducated guess.
“Listen, you,” I said. “I’m an exile. Very well. But I’m positive that while I opt to stay alive, the Committee has to keep me that way. So if I say I need something urgently, you have to send it to me.”
“We cannot send you any femurs,” moaned the computer.
“I don’t want a drumdiking femur, for God’s sake.”
It probably thought it was a femur that had fallen down the provision dispenser, but now something worse had slipped out.
“Godgodgod,” it asked itself, searching frantically the stockpiled labyrinth of its brain. “Godgod? Godgod? Godgod?”
“Shut up. Cancel. Be quiet,” I cried. “Forget about God. It’s a sensation, a belief, I don’t know—forget it. Forget about femurs, too. They’re not animals, I’ve got a couple anyhow, and believe me, if I do ever break one, you’ll hear me screaming quite clearly in the city without recourse to a monitor beam. What I want is this: one extra water mixer, on rather a large scale, about the size of the ship, say, and rigged for adaption, and some housing for it, and, obviously, self-servicing equipment tied in. And you’d better use a displacement machine, because I’ll need it by noon at the latest.”