Drinking Sapphire Wine

by Tanith Lee

  “Attlevey,” voices murmured, silkily, joyfully.

  The tiny plane, built to carry two, or three at the most, was crammed with five Jang. Their hair was shades of yellow, hyacinth, viradian, pink-orchid; the two females had long, long nails, the males’ nails were even longer. They wore see-through, chains, rings, bracelets, anklets. They were smoking incense through tubes from a weeny glass bubble fixed in the ceiling, their eyes were dark with ecstasy, and full flagons of Joyousness were clasped in their pretty paws. They smiled up at me from their semi-recumbent positions on the couches or each other, and their sequined faces were full of visions and mysteries, and shone with the pure radiance which only total imbecility can bring.

  Oh. Beautiful.

  “Attlevey,” they reiterated. A male with flowing dark-green locks waved his hand.

  “I’m Naz. This is Felainnillaloxiandphy.”

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  “We know who you are,” he said.

  “You do.”

  “Oh, ooma-kasma, we do.”

  I shrank. Effusive turd.

  “Well, ooma-kasma,” I said, “I really think you actually don’t, or you wouldn’t be here.” A cold anger, not untinged by blind panic, had welled in my reinforced bones. “Just tell me, have you informed the Committee you were coming here?”

  “Ooma-kasma,” drawled Naz, popping an extra pill down his gullet, “we went right in the Committee Hall, and oh infinity, did we like anything tell them. Listen, you thalldraps,” went on Naz, demonstrating, “you can all jump in the vacuum drift. We’re off to where everything is for real. You bet.”

  “So they know you’re here. What did they say?”

  “They said: If you go you can’t come back—oh—if you go you can’t come back—oh—” Naz discovered he had broken into an involuntary but apparently Naz-pleasing song, so went on. The other four, Felainnillaloxiandphy, joined in.

  So there they were, a parcel of useless Jang idiots, entirely enmeshed in Jang mores and habits, intent on molesting my desert. Did they really realize what they’d done? That they had been exiled? “For real. You bet.”

  “Do you have any link with the city?”

  “Four BEE? Oh, yah, yah, ooma, my ooma. They put in a monitor beam in case we need any more ecstasy or incense,” Naz broke off his singing to reassure me. “Say, ooma, have a pill?”

  “No. Get on your beam link and tell the computer you didn’t mean it. You want to come back.”

  Naz broke off again. Something had penetrated.

  “But we do mean it, ooma-kasma. And we don’t want to go back.”

  “Yes you do. Have you looked out yet?” Their windows were as opaque as their brains. Maybe they’d get agoraphobiafied and throw up all over the grove, but at least they’d leave afterward. How could the Committee refuse them reentry? After all, they seemed model citizens to me.

  Inspired by the suggestion, they were scrambling about, agile and luminous, and nearly trod me under their sparkling feet as they dashed into the great outdoors.

  It was worse, much worse, than I’d thought.

  Not a trace of insecurity or fear.

  They were wandering from tree to tree, flower to flower.

  “Oh, ooma-kasma,” they were extolling each other, “just look at this, and this. Infinity, it’s all so groshing,” as they squashed flat the buds and picked the newborn blossoms to stuff in their abysmal hair.

  Maybe the Gray-Eyeses would get them.

  Maybe the snakes would strangle them.

  Maybe the food tests would prove the fruits were poisonous, and I could feed them to the Jang: “Computer? I’m afraid I have five Jang here, suicided, ready for PD.”

  They were swaying and swerving in the direction of the sand-ship, holding hands and pulling off leaves so they could admire them better.

  “Ooma-kasma-maa!” they warbled back to me.

  “Coming,” I grimly answered.

  4

  They but loved the ship. They’d never been in one before. They dived into the cabins and out of them. They flung open the doors to the pool-tank and dived into that and came out soaking wet. Two of them, the two females—Felainnilla—got hold of Yay and tried to dismantle him, with yipping recollections of previous city dome sabotage. Having stopped this, I found the other two males—Loxiandphy—had programmed a machine for some sort of bright mauve paint, and were painting with it all along the tasteful walls of the corridors things like THE DESERT WASTE IS COSMIC, OOMA or CACTUS COME AND EAT MY SOUL. They weren’t too hard to deflect, being smashed to the very small back rooms of their tiny minds.

  At last they flaked out in their entirety in the saloon, and I got clearing-up operations under way. I glanced in on the food tests, hopefully, but the poison analysis wasn’t complete and, in any case, looked as if it might be negative. Perhaps I could grate some syntho-something in their fifth meal.

  For they’d ordered fifth meal from Borss, and it had come. Tucking in with good appetite, they bawled away about how wonderful it was to rough it in the wild, so clean, uncluttered, and fresh, ooma-kasma. Then a male with hyacinth tresses (Loxi) and the female of the pineapple curls (Felain) went rootling by on their way to clash nastily with the scarlet cabin. I just knew they’d very carefully married before they left BEE. Unable to resist having love in these bucolic surroundings, the dust-pink Nilla girl and Phy, a grim, macabre cobalt creature with jewelry to match, thudded out to the yellow cabin. Naz lay among the debris of nut-steak-on-fire and smiled in laconic fashion.

  “Well, ooma-kasma. I know you don’t believe marriage is necessary first, so what about it?”

  I still had the steel hoe in my hand; I showed it to him.

  “I’ve been male enough times to know just where to aim so that it hurts,” I said. “Until I can get you off my patch, I realize I’m stuck with you, but don’t push your luck.”

  Even I was not that desperate.

  “Ooma, ooma,” sirened Naz, as if I’d injured his inmost id, “what a disappointment you are to me. You, the shining star of Four BEE’s Jang, and in such a becoming body.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I know our teeth are reinforced, but unless you shut up, I’m definitely willing to try and knock yours right down your throat.”

  I got the monitor beam going, but the computer took a while in coming on.

  “There’s been a mistake,” I informed it. “Five Jang have arrived here that didn’t mean to—a bird-plane malfunction. Can you send someone to take them back? I don’t think they’ll make it on their own.”

  The computer rattled, then:

  “Once they have made contact with you, they are to be considered as exiles.”

  Its metallic voice-tape sounded altered somehow, even less approachable than before.

  “God!” I shouted at it, to see what would happen.

  “God is a primitive and untenable invention,” it promptly replied. Somebody had reprogrammed it. No longer was it a fascinated adversary, it was a cold, cold enemy who wouldn’t play games. From here on, its answer would, in every sense, be no.

  “OK,” I said, “you’re being unfair and clunk-headed, but I expected nothing else. Go fry in your storage batteries.”

  It never even twitched.

  Thus, what? Here was I stranded with five awfuls, who would ruin my dream by sheer lack of personality. Yet they were outcast. And if I slew them (murderer, killer, why else were you cast from home and dome?) it was PD for them. And maybe even their barren little egos were dear to them.

  If only Kam were here, Kam and Danor.

  But they weren’t, and wouldn’t be till sunset at the earliest, and I had no means to signal them. I must cope solo.

  There was a slender chance.

  I went back into the saloon, where Naz lay stretched in midair on a float-cushion he’d got one of the robots to blow up for him.

  “Changed your derisann mind, ooma-kasma?”

  “Naz,” I said, “I think we ought to talk. I can tell
you’re the mainstay of your circle. The others look up to you, don’t they? It was your decision to leave the city?”

  I’d hit the target, fair and square. He smiled indulgently. Ecstasy had presumably faded from him a little, since he actually heard some of what I said.

  “You know, ooma-kasma, you know. Well, they’ve got to have someone. I’m stronger—you think so?—then Phy—he’s the other predom male. Loxi’s just everywhere and on the moons. Nilla’s a girl, never anything but. Ultra-female, you know? Scratchy. Felain, she’s predom tangled-up. She suicided every day for a whole vrek, got so bad even the Q-Rs thought she’d done it mistakenly. Then they stuffed her in cold store for thirty units. Now she really only wants to go with Nilla, and Nilla won’t be a male, and Felain doesn’t want to be a male, and it’s a real live floop-show, ooma.”

  I sat down. As he’d let all this out, a little streak of intelligent, bewildered compassion had shown on his face.

  “It sounds bad,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Did I tell you Loxi starved himself to death in BAA? Took ninety units. And Phy gets melancholia in the dark. When it’s night, he’ll cry.”

  “That will be something to look forward to,” I said; but my heart was rending me with its claws.

  “As for me,” he said, “I don’t have problems. Life is just one gray-rose nebula from dawn to grakking dawn.”

  And before I could stop him, he’d shoveled handfuls of ecstasy down his throat and was soon floating in every direction, singing: “Oh, it’s great, ooma-kasma. The ceiling is full of little chandeliers—one, two, three, one, two, three …”

  After this, any attempt to get through to him was a pointless exercise. It was only as I’d caught him on the down-surge of ecstasy that I’d got such a wild repercussion to my mild, would-be clever query.

  But I could see their whole circle was in a right mess; not model citizens, just the normal kind, jollity and delight for the skin, neurasthenia in the joints.

  Makerish again? Five child-substitutes?

  Along the corridor, outside the apartments, shouts.

  Beyond the closed yellow door, a groaning male voice entreating: “Nilla, Nilla, do it again.” By the closed yellow door, pineapple-curled Felain clenching her fists and yelling, and Loxi saying: “Oh, er, look, ooma, for my sake—”

  Now ecstasy was wearing thin, their true human traits were showing, their foibles, bad nerves, and wretchedness. Felain was poorly insulated electric fire, Loxi, unideal partner, a tepid, nonquenching puddle.

  I put back on the storm I’d lost with Naz.

  “You two,” I raged, “if you want to live on my land and in my ship, you can just get used to taking orders from me.”

  “Squiggle off,” said Felain, so I spun her around with one hand and smacked her in her delicate puss. I don’t like hitting people. They may hit you back. Besides, I didn’t want to damage her looks when she was now stuck with this body, and the healing salve was the sum total of what we had till a robot-rescue arrived to set her nose, or whatever.

  A welt appeared on her damascene cheek, and having noted she wasn’t going to biff me, I felt shame ooze in my spine. But too late for shame, and it wasn’t too bad; would pale to nothing in half an hour.

  “Now listen, and take this in. You poured off your plane, you trampled through the bushes, you picked the leaves and the flowers. So now you’re going to come with me and do some chores out there to make up for the damage. You, Loxi, minus your chains and bells, and you, Felain, in something the briars won’t rip off your back in three splits.”

  Felain lowered her lashes and gave me an unmistakable look through them, so for a moment I felt I was almost back in my male poet’s body.

  “Yes, ooma,” she said demurely.

  “So. See to your clothes and get outside,” I gruffly added, resenting the muddle she was making of my hormones. Loxi flew to obey, and Felain slunk, provocatively.

  Within, cries and moans reached a crescendo and dwindled.

  “You two,” I said through the door, “are to be out on the veranda in twelve splits, dressed for hard work.”

  “You’re kidding,” muttered Phy. “I’ve worked hard enough.”

  But the crawler’s whine was in his voice.

  Nilla, the dusky-pink delicacy, who obviously dominated both Phy and Felain, called sweetly:

  “Twelve splits is too soon, ooma-kasma. Come in and we’ll show you why.”

  So I opened the door and went in, demonstrating that I wasn’t to be intimidated.

  Quite instructive it was, too, to one of my relatively modest tastes.

  “Very artistic,” I said, “but you can still make the deadline. If you don’t, my robots, which I have programmed to take instructions only from me, will come and bring you out as you are, accessories and all.”

  I hadn’t actually reprogrammed the robots and, having masterfully stridden forth, I rushed to do so. I put in an override order, too, in case anyone tried to block my block. Yay, Bross, and Jaska bore it with softly ticking forbearance.

  After twenty-five splits. Felainnillaloxiandphy stood uneasily giggling and jostling in the porch, Naz having ecstasied into unconsciousness in the saloon.

  I was going to have to teach them to garden, since there was nothing else I could do with them. At least they jumped when I spoke. Even Nilla was being cautious.

  Felain sidled by, but I’d calmed myself. Poet no longer. Confront the facts, as a female, it was Hergal I wanted, wormwood truth I would now admit. Never mind. I’d got the upper hand with this lot, for a while anyhow.

  And in about two hours the sun would set, and my friends would be coming home to save me from complete collapse.

  5

  The sun dropped like a jewel below the western horizon. There the mountains seem to sink back into the sands, leaving open that way to the cities from which, half crazy and running, I had come. A western horizon of tall dunes mounted on low rock, taller dunes since the sandstorm, maybe bare stone after the next.

  Amber afterglow. Jang strewn along the veranda wailing about bones torn from sockets, muscles liquidized, sunburn. Luckily their skins—not one seemed to have designed a really desert-suited body—had not reacted too badly. Nilla, least burned of everyone, mewed that she was the worst burned. Felain rubbed salve into her, dreamily.

  They’d worked very hard. Too hard for themselves, harder than they’d meant to.

  Only Nilla still picked flowers. I’d seen her. Just like a child from hypno-school nicking a goody from under a Q-R’s nose. Nilla might be a handicap. I was fairly sure she’d done this predominantly female thing only in order to throw her circle off balance, in particular hapless Felain. Still, they were stuck with Nilla as a girl now, Nilla included.

  Even Naz had loitered out onto the veranda. He lay on the pillowy couch, humming.

  I’d had to warn them not to stare at the sun.

  And now the sun had sunk.

  I’d been so sure Danor and Kam would be back at this time that I’d been listening and looking around for several splits for their plane. Once I thought I heard it, but was mistaken. I’d been banking on their help in dealing with this mob, most of whom, I had the feeling, hadn’t been Jang for very long. Danor was about my age in Janghood, Kam, of course, older.

  But the plane didn’t come. And didn’t come.

  The sky emptied out into palest indigo. Stars burned through. The Jang, forgetting to grumble, stared at these phenomena silently, not taking ecstasy or howling about “This is where it’s at, ooma-kasma,” or anything. Even Naz was filling his drug-shadowed eyes.

  “There’s no moon,” complained Nilla.

  “So go up and make one,” Phy told her. He wasn’t crying with melancholia either. If he ever had.

  Presently it was a mealtime, and they vaguely went off to eat it, like good children. I’d told them, attempting to intimidate them with numbers, that Danor and Kam would be here later, but they’d forgotten.

&nbs
p; I stayed outside, watching, waiting.

  They sky darkened. There was a silken rustle of subsiding sand about a mile away, the sound of it trickling easily across those spaces of quiet. The day had tired me out.

  The Sisters woke me, punctual as ever. They woke the Jang, too, who had collapsed in comas of exhaustion in the saloon. They came hopping out to see the volcanic fireworks, half-scared, half-admiring.

  “Your friends are late,” said Naz. “Got any ecstasy? I took all mine and the machines won’t dispense; say you programmed the robots to program them not to.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “You can forego the ecstasy, or you’ll be unfit for work tomorrow.”

  Naz, lethargically cursing me, meandered off.

  No Danor, no Kam.

  My guts had turned cold. Irrational. Anything could have delayed them. Most probably trouble with the newly set monitor computer. And yet, and yet.

  “Ooh-weeh!” screeched Nilla at the Sisters, more or less in my ear.

  I got up. I was going to check with the blasted computer, even if it did mean giving the water-mixer game away.

  “I’m inquiring about some fellow exiles of mine,” I said. “Danor, female body from BEE, Kam, older male, BAA. They’ve put down over the mountains from me, eastward, I’m not precisely sure where. Have they been in contact with you on their monitor beam?”

  Rattle. (Even the rattle sounded more efficient, more resolute.)

  “They have.”

  “When?”

  Click.

  “Computed time of desert noon.”

  “Noon?”

  “Noon.”

  “I wasn’t obviously going to get anything for free, so I sold us out.

  “What did they want?”

  “Two water mixers.”

  “Oh—ah—how odd!” I, falsely amazed.

  “The request was refused,” said the computer. “Their plane was given your coordinates and they were told to join you and share your water mixer.”

  “Did they argue?”

  “For approximately one hour.”

  Good for Kam. I could imagine.