by Tanith Lee
And Hatta:
“How long have you been there?”
I said:
“You were involved enough, Danor. About one split, Hatta. I repeat—what Committee order?”
“A Committee messenger bee came while you were sleeping,” said Danor. “They want you and each of us at the Committee Hall in Second Sector tomorrow, first thing.”
“Surprise, surprise,” I said. It sounded but too familiar. “And how’s Zirk?”
“They’ve kept him in Limbo for observation,” said Danor.
“Nice for them.”
“You ought to take this seriously,” said Hatta.
“How will that help?”
We sat and stared at the pool.
The swan teetered to the edge, but Hatta flapped it away again with his bizarre arms.
“You, er, you know I’ll stick by you,” said Hatta.
“Please,” I said, “I’ve got enough problems without that.”
“Oh, ooma—” said Danor.
“Oh ooma nothing. If he ‘sticks by me’ at the Hall looking like that, they’ll slap an I.A. First-Class Maladjusted label on him from the start, and what good will that be to me, might I ask?”
“You are a bastard,” said Hatta, unnerving me again slightly, for strong language, even when obsolete, was not generally his province.
“No such thing, Hatta, not anymore. Been in the History Tower too?”
“I’ve been just about everywhere you’ve been, and you know why,” said Hatta.
Yes, I knew why. Hatta loved me, and once, when I had been broken in pieces by everything and he arrived on my porch with hair the color of honey and a body fair as morning…I’d only got to dig up my metal-tape saga from twelve vreks ago to find that dismal story.
“Get going, Hatta,” I said. And Hatta, as ever, got.
“You’re very unkind to him,” said Danor.
“I suppose Kam would have acted differently?”
She looked at me.
“Yes, Kam would.”
“But Kam wasn’t Jang,” I said. “Jang—Jang—bloody Jang.”
We sat silently in the garden for some while, and the swan careered about in the flowers, occasionally falling down or singing: “The wild white magic of your hair, the warm mauve magic of your eyes, both drive me zaradann.”
* * *
—
I wondered if I’d see my old Q-R of the water carpet, the poor sod who’d formerly nursed me through my successive ambitions—the anti-Jang change, the work search, and my last scheme to make a child, which ended in such horror and wretchedness. However, there was neither sight nor sign of him. Maybe he’d had to be dismantled after his dealings with me—the strain must have been considerable. Or possibly he was just keeping out of my way—ditto.
Danor came with me, which I could have done without. I anticipated a grim sequence ahead.
We went through the usual Committee Hall routine of tunnel-rides, flying floors, waiting areas, and finally emerged in a circular cold-cream room with seats in tiers, mostly empty, and a central dais, mostly full. Q-Rs with miserably stern faces were packed onto it, their memory units and what-have-you no doubt clacking and clonking away in their joints. The people back on the tiers were all Older, and obviously had some vague status—doubtless merely titular—in the running of the city Committee affairs. Along the edges of the dais, like a garish flower bed, sat just about every Jang I had a nodding acquaintance with in Four BEE. Not to mention my circle. Kley, female; Mirri, female—fast work, she must have overdosed her meal injections again; Thinta, female of course, but no cats—probably forcibly tom from her at the entrance; even Hergal, male, and neurotic at being here and covering by slumping in attitudes of defiant nonchalance; and, at the very end, a tiny, delicate, perky little creature, tinkling crystals, with pale-pink satin lotus buds in her hair the exact exquisite tint of her mammalian tips, Zirk!
I burst into raucous laughter at that, overwrought as I was, and had to be restrained. Danor tugged at my arm, bees zoomed, Q-Rs flapped, and Older People muttered disparagingly. A male Jang appeared at my side.
“Get a grip on yourself,” he said.
“Get a grip on your graks,” I suggested. He was nothing special, gray and gross, an unimaginative haphazard body choice, but at least no duplicate limbs or heads, and no scarlet: it was Hatta come back to be my Tower of Strength.
“It’s Hatta,” said Danor.
“I know. Who else could it be? How’d you change so fast, Hatta? Your thirty units weren’t up.”
“Never mind that,” said Hatta, embarrassed by his selfless act—he detested suiciding. “I took your point last night.”
We had reached the dais, and were now separated. I found myself right in the middle of everything—room, Q-Rs, Jang, the lot. An unenviable position.
I tried to relax, but it was difficult. Muscles tensed and the skin twitched under my shadowy poet’s eyes.
Everyone was fluttering and whispering. Nobody actually came out with a direct sentence. I looked around at them and beamed beneficently. “Well, isn’t this fun?” I said in a loud voice.
It brought the Q-Rs to attention, as I’d suspected it might. One in the center, an important-looking being in gold, rapped on the little table in front of him.
“You will kindly not display levity. This is a very dreadful situation,” he said.
“Oh, awful,” I agreed. “Poor Zirk cut down in his prime, and back five splits later looking like a refrigerated silk flower.”
Zirk jumped up and began to squeak malevolently at me, with crystalline tears welling from her dusky eyes. Other Jang joined in, and the gold Q-R rapped and rapped until a gong went off somewhere, and every body stopped shouting in surprise.
“This inquiry will be conducted with propriety,” thundered the Q-R, rather optimistically. He turned to me. “You will now give us an account of what precisely led up to this unfortunate event, whose significance, clearly, few of you comprehend.”
“All right,” I said. “One day when I was standing outside Silver Mountain, Zirk—male, and about the size of a small museum—knocked me flying and challenged me to a duel. That is—”
“Yes,” said the Q-R. “We have looked up dueling in the files and we know.”
“I agreed to the duel, and we met in Ilex Park, where, due to superior skill and more practice, I won. Zirk is now happily installed in a new body, and everything, I should have thought, is insumattly derisann.”
There were some laughs at this, which the Q-R ignored.
“It is not,” he said. “Neither is that a full account.”
“Oh, well, I do apologize. I thought it was. Of course, I omitted to say that Ilex Park at the time was its usual uninspired jade-green and the dome sun was rising in its usual damn silly way and the dry ice was puffing about nicely all over us. Is that better?”
“You will be silent,” said the Q-R.
“Don’t bank on it.”
“You will be silent,” went on the Q-R, “or you will be silenced by hypno-spray. Which?”
“I’ll be silent,” I agreed.
“Jang Zirk,” said the Q-R, “perhaps you’d give us your version.”
Zirk got up again, balancing precariously on her weeny silver-slippered feet. She dabbed her eyes and said, huskily now: “I see it was ever so selt—er—foolish of me. But I, um, lost my temper.” She tittered like a peal of bells. Just think of Zirk loosing her temper, ooh! How quaint of her.
“Permission to speak,” I said. They looked at me. “If Zirk continues like this, I’m going to be ill all over your lovely white room.”
I shouldn’t have risked it, but I was past reason. Giggles filled the air, Zirk stamped and nearly fell down. Next second a cool rain dropped on me from an overhead bee, and I was rendered duly limp and speechless
, only my ears and eyes and brain left ticking, which I could have foregone.
And Zirk was continuing.
“It was just the way he lied to us all and carried Danor off. I mean, we were all so frightfully anxious to meet her! And then, not marrying! So shocking to avoid a Jang custom like that. Well, I just got ever so angry”—eyelashes flittered, mouth pouted—“and when I met him, I just couldn’t control myself. Oh dear. And we’ve been such sweethearts in the past, he and I. I couldn’t tell you the times we’ve married and had love. Oh, there I go, digressing. Well, I only meant it to be a sort of friendly bout. But he went zaradann—zaradann, I tell you. I’ve never seen such a thing.” Zirk clasped her pink-nailed hands and sighed with terror. “He cut me down without mercy.”
8
After Zirk, everyone had a say.
Thinta said I’d always been unstable, but it was my temperament, and I meant well. She hoped the Committee realized that she’d been a good influence on me, and had always tried to keep me out of trouble.
Kley said I ought to be whipped, and volunteered to do it.
Mirri said Zirk had wounded me and I’d played quite fairly. She said I was mad but she didn’t mind. She said Danor had forced me into acting ignorantly and thoughtlessly, and the Committee ought to ship her back to BAA.
Hergal said I’d killed Zirk deliberately (he was the first to use the word “kill”). He added that Zirk asked for it and would have got me if he’d been able. The Committee then asked Hergal about my earlier challenge to himself, and Hergal told them, in detail. He said I was predominantly female and needed a sex change back and that was all that was wrong with me and could he go now because he was fed up with being there. The Committee said no.
Danor looked as pale as I’d designed myself to be, and gorgeous. She said calmly that it had been a mutual decision for us to go away alone together and to have love without marrying. We hadn’t meant to upset anybody. The Committee said hadn’t she spent a lot of time with an Older Person in BAA without marrying, and hadn’t the Committee there advised them to part? I could see her hands trembling when she answered yes, that was so, looking at them straight on and not lowering her voice. The Jang gasped and exclaimed at her daring and obscenity and were gonged into quiet. The Committee said that her actions were curious and showed unusually antisocial tendencies. Danor did not answer, but when she sat down again she shut her eyes as if she were very tired.
Hatta said my first challenge to Hergal had been a joke, and Zirk was a fool. He said Zirk had meant to kill me (other Jang later supported this, recalling Zirk’s threats to me outside Silver Mountain). Hatta said I hadn’t meant to kill Zirk, only incapacitate him, but Zirk fell on my sword. There was an outcry at this.
Doval said I was terrific with a sworge and I’d known exactly what I was doing when I went for Zirk. Doval said he hoped the Committee would make dueling a regular pastime in the parks, and a roar of delight drowned even the gong.
Several out-circle Jang girls said I was wonderful, and several out-circle Jang males said I used to be all right when I was female. One male said if I ever came near his circle he’d meet me in Ilex Park and do better than Zirk did.
Altogether, everyone more or less said different things, and nobody really fully agreed with anyone else, either about me or what I had done.
About nine thousand mealtimes had gone by, and the Jang were noisily pleading for food. Even the pompous Older People looked uncomfortable.
At length the gold Q-R announced that if we went next door, we should discover sustenance, but we should come back in an hour when we heard the gong. To begin with I thought I would be left in my hypno-sprayed condition, alone and foodless, but a bee came over and shot me full of something, and I got to my feet all faculties restored.
I took Danor’s hand as the crowd went milling ahead.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” I said.
“Then don’t tell me,” she answered, softly, smiling, still Danor.
Gray Hatta came up.
“You should have done what they said,” he predictably told me.
We went through into a merry yellow room where the Jang were falling on nut-steak, wine-cakes, and rock-cherries with shrill cries. The Older People had gone off somewhere more peaceful to stuff themselves.
“What would you like, Danor?” asked Hatta politely.
“Oh, nothing, thank you.”
“Nor me,” I said.
“You must eat,” instructed Hatta.
Zirk came floating up then, a couple of males trailing her interestedly. Both bore a distinct resemblance to Zirk’s male bodies, a strange phenomenon I had noted before here and there. Maybe everyone only wants to have love with themselves really.
“Attlevey,” said Zirk to me, lowering her pastel lids. “I do so hope you didn’t mean those drumdik things you said about me, ooma. When this nasty business is over, possibly we could meet and have a talk about everything, um, do you think?”
“Zirk,” I said, “you may be steeped in scent and prisms, with a waist the width of my wrist, but if you don’t beat it, I’m going to tip the nearest jug of silver-cordial right down your cleavage.”
“Here now,” boomed Zirk’s escort in bass voices. They were waving their ten-ton fists aloft when Mirri thrust between them.
“You!” she yelled at Zirk, “you’re worse than her!” indicating Danor. “I think you’ve got an absolutely farathooming nerve.” And she slung a bowl of rock-cherries in Zirk’s powdered face and began to pull out her curled flaxen hair in handfuls while Zirk screamed pitifully.
Zirk’s two champions tried to rescue her, and someone who fancied Mirri came haring across to rescue her. Presently, chaos reigned.
Danor, Hatta, and I, for once in agreement, shrank to the side as an incredible Jang fight broke out in every direction. Some were siding with Mirri, some with Zirk. Some were just enjoying themselves. Nuts, cakes, and bubbling liquor flew through the air, and shrieks and crashes resounded.
Suddenly a siren tore across the uproar. An amplified Q-R voice bellowed: “Cease fighting at once or you will be sprayed.”
Violence faltered and petered out. Jang stood staring about, their clothes in ribbons and their faces daubed with bruises and crushed-orange.
“You will return in orderly fashion to the Inquiry Hall. Take your seats, and remain silent.”
It was just like hypno-school. Which, considering the recent antics, was not to be wondered at.
Everybody filed docilely through and sat, surreptitiously brushing off their see-throughs and getting cake out of their jewelry. The Q-Rs were still on the dais, but a look of abject horror had settled on their faces. They were well and truly scared—not for themselves for their programming doesn’t really allow them that, but for us, for what we might do to each other.
When everything was quiet enough to hear the dust-absorbers at work in the ceiling, the gold Q-R rose to his feet and focused on me.
“We have come to a decision,” he said.
Up till that instant, despite my earlier—disregarded—caution, I hadn’t credited the situation with too much importance. It was harrowing only because of its stuffiness. Cities run by robots and androids specifically geared to serve the community didn’t intimidate anyone that much. I hadn’t expected them to take any vital action, beyond another inconvenient black mark against me and some sort of piddling little reprimand, and perhaps a restriction, like putting the parks off limits to me for fifty units or something. Punishments were never used and fines were extinct. The only powers ever exercised were always, however exacerbating, supposed to be for your own good in the end.
But something in the Q-R’s somber tone sent white-hot sparks through my innards.
“We want everyone to understand this,” said the Q-R, glancing about at the Jang witnesses. “The notion of crime was abolished long sin
ce, so it has not been easy for us to determine what we should do. We have comprehended that the Jang Zirk was the aggressor in this particular instance, and that, had the circumstances been reversed, he would be sitting now where the Accused is sitting.” A murmur at that “Accused.” The Q-R continued: “Nevertheless, as under the ancient laws which preceded our present data, it is the actual Killer who is to pay the penalty.”
No murmur at that second word. It struck too deep, like the very blade I’d used. Killer. I have killed, therefore I am a—
“Also, by reference to certain zoom-scan pictures recorded in the Flash Center, we have observed the face of the Accused during the combat. Unmistakably, the intent to kill was present.” The Q-R turned again to me. “It is a rare occurrence. Or it was. Since death no longer exists, the desire to kill—founded as it was on the idea of being rid of something—has mainly atrophied. Where it has not, the Dream Rooms and Adventure Palaces have diverted the emotion along harmless channels. Now, however, one of you has killed—not himself, which is his right, but another against his will, and the fancy may well take root in many minds. Look at the violence already unleashed, look at yourselves. Although anyone murdered in the city can be reclaimed immediately at Limbo as with a suicide, this does not detract from the frightfulness of the act of Murder itself, and it is on this premise that we have passed sentence. You had better remain sitting,” he added to me, quite compassionately, so I guess I’d attempted some stab at getting up, but my legs had gone to jelly and I hadn’t made it. “There is a choice,” he said. “Please consider carefully. You will have three units in which to do so. Firstly, you may go to Limbo and experience Personality Dissolution. As you know, this means your consciousness will be darkened and your memory wiped clean. As is usual, you will re-emerge three rorls from now and resume life in the cities, unhampered by past guilt, or by these antisocial drives which have grown up in you (this last merely the culmination of many suspect misdemeanors, one of which, we remind you, concerned the destruction of your unborn baby due to sheer folly on your part). When you leave PD yours will be an entirely changed ego. You will commence again at the child stage, as is general, with a suitable Q-R guardian, knowing only that you are returning, but recalling nothing, either of this current era, or of your present personality. Normally PD is performed for those who have lived many rorls and feel the urge to slough the mental accumulations of time. In your case, it is considered a cardinal condition, if you are to remain as a citizen of the Fours.”