by Tanith Lee
No noise in the great circular room. I couldn’t even hear my heart beating. If it was.
The Q-R narrowed his eyes as if what he told me hurt him.
“The alternative to loosing your identity and your individuality so soon is this: that you leave the dome four units from today, and exist thereafter in the desert, in exile, denied access to Four BEE, Four BAA, and Four BOO for the indefinite period of your natural human span—which might possibly continue anything up to a rorl. You will be supplied, of course, with every life support and commodity you may ask for, within reason. Also you will be permitted, before your departure, one final body choice, so that you can design a body best suited to your needs and your situation. Additionally, your location will be monitored, and, should you require medical or other functional aid, it will be sent you. Otherwise no contact with any city or citizen will be granted you. The disadvantages of this alternative are several, as you can perceive. Loneliness and fear are hazards. And, as your body grows older, it will age, an unpleasant process, not recommended. In the end, provided you do not suicide before, a natural death will terminate your life, after which the city will reclaim you, and PD will be carried out in any case, in order that finally you may be returned into the social structure of Four BEE.”
He folded his hands.
“In either circumstance, every one of your present relationships, intimate or otherwise, is over forever. On your reemergence, three rorls—or more—from today, your contemporaries may have passed themselves voluntarily into Personality Dissolution, and even if they have not, you will never remember them nor they you in your reawakened form. Not one here with you at this moment will you be likely to call lover or friend again in the future.”
Abruptly the heavy quiet was broken. Some Jang girl was wailing that they couldn’t do it to me, it was ghastly, unspeakable. I think I’d only married her for a unit once, about a vrek before.
“This choice,” our instructor cut in and silenced her, “is the only one you are offered. There is no other way. You must resign yourself, and decide. Rorls in the past, you yourself would have met death—actual and total death. Obliteration—as the punishment for your crime. We have tried to act in your ultimate best interests as well as those of the community at large, and it has cost us a great deal of energy and time. You have three units, no more, no less. Sort out your affairs and consider your plans carefully. As for the rest of the Jang in this room, we hope you will take the warning to heart. Please now, go home.”
* * *
—
They hurried by me as though I had plague.
I had.
Thinta and Mirri were crying, even Kley was crying. Hergal looked as sick as he had in the park. Zirk too. No doubt she was thinking that but for my fencer’s skill, this choice would have been hers to make, not mine.
The Q-Rs also stole away, and the Older People. Eventually I was left with only Hatta and Danor.
I wondered dully if Hatta would say, “I told you so.” He didn’t. He stood staring into nothing. I’d forgotten he loved me, or thought he did. It was in some ways almost as shattering a blow for him, for he was going to lose me forever and a unit.
Danor put her face against mine. There were no tears on her cheek, yet the sorrow hung on her like a sad smoky perfume.
“Danor,” I said, “hold me. Don’t let me go.”
9
You bet I had a party. It was the inevitable thing to do. The extreme reaction which extremity forces you into.
Besides, everyone predicted I’d give a party. They also predicted that at the height of the festivity and abandon, I’d leap from a roof or dive into a pool without an oxygen injection and not swimming, or maybe, if their luck was really in, douse myself with Joyousness and strike an igniter in my ear. That was the only way to behave, after all. For there was only one answer to my choice of alternatives—die and let Limbo destroy my soul, or at any rate, wash it spotless and characterless. Three rorls of oblivion, followed by a repeat childhood and permanent amnesia, were a dire fate for a Jang, a crushing blow none of them spoke of, but which you could tell they were considering from the way the color fled their cheeks. But the other thing, exile and despair among the dunes, companionless till the end of my days, growing dry as the sand, creaky and wizened as the cacti, and agoraphobia everywhere—never, never! If, by some master stroke of insanity, I had accepted that, I would put paid to myself inside a quarter vrek anyway. So, glorious, tumultuous suicide now it would have to be. Go out with a bang, show everyone what I was made of…
They were so interested in what I’d do, so fascinated by the notion of my macabre farewell feast, they forgot or mislaid their revulsion at my contaminating doom, and flocked around me from sunrise to sunrise.
I wondered if one or both of my makers—last seen many moons ago—might signal me, to say goodbye, or something. Anything. But they didn’t. Probably they were both in Boo or Baa, and didn’t get to hear of it or even realize it was me, their child, until it was too late.
Under sentence, I felt hollow, pithless. The first and second units of the time they’d allowed me, I woke with a feeling of blind clawing terror. The second unit I wept, and Danor wept with me.
She asked me if she should go, but I said stay. I needed her, or thought I needed her, I don’t know why, because it didn’t really help, though she was steady and tender. The swan wandered about peeing on things and falling on things. The swan saved us a little, but only a little. I made an arrangement for Danor to have my home after I was…no longer in residence.
One excellent fact: Everything I bought was free, including the extra novelties for the party. I suppose the Committee understood I was incapable, in the circumstances, of groveling out thank-yous in a pay booth.
Nearly all Four BEE’s Jang must have come to that party, or it seemed like it.
It was my last night in the world, and I’d taken enough ecstasy to launch a small rocket into space. I was absolutely numb with it, couldn’t feel a thing; even the prospect before me seemed unimportant, bearable almost. So what were three rorls? There’d be other Danors. Hypno-school was OK, mainly you didn’t know about it anyhow, and I was going to make an utter promok out of my Q-R guardian. My ego would strike back through the brainwashing and consciousness-darkening, somehow it would. I was incorrigible, wasn’t I? So drink up and swallow the pretty pills, and goodbye Danor, how I’ll miss your beautiful—better forget about that, my friend, if you’re going to be a kiddy all over again in three rorls’ time.
The whole riot took place in the Moon Gardens in Second Sector. Blue and green fireballs of non-hot flame lit the groves of filigree trees. The fountains ran with blue wine, and a dragon or two from BAA glittered here and there, and BAA android females sang in sweet voices, plants growing from their heads and bursting into blossom. The sky was full of Jang riding starry birds, and rainbows, and golden-scented rain.
We also sang at the long tables, most of the vomitous Jang hit songs, delivering them with passion and sincerity. I was toying with the idea of slashing my wrists in an antique style of suiciding princes at feasts, but concluded I was too hazy with ecstasy to get it right, and abandoned the fancy. Then came the Masque of Death—a small entertainment I’d dreamed up that evening to give them all colic.
I designed it via a thought-receptive screen, the sort of effort the Dream Rooms and the Picture-Vision places use. The resulting montage was thrown three-dimensionally out into the Moon Gardens, and grim and grand it was.
Six pairs of dancers, three male and three female, in emerald and scarlet velvet with golden-tassel hair. They danced and they embraced, they offered each other gifts and smiled into each other’s eyes. Then came death—the Ego-Death of Limbo’s PD. It was a black-enameled worm and its head was a white skull. It thrust between them and they were smitten in its coils. They lay on the grass like broken flowers and the worm laughed, and sang a bri
ef song of my composing, telling how Ego-Death was best for them and the community. I must already have been fairly ecstatic when I invented that song. It was silly, garbled, and amazingly bitter and terrible, and you could see the Jang blanching at a distance of fifty paces. Then bells rang and the fallen dancers rose. They bowed to the worm, and went on bowing until they shrank down to the size of children. They didn’t know who they were or who the others were, their friends and lovers, but ran off after the worm, kissing its oily tail, with blindfolds obscuring their eyes.
“That’s it,” Hergal said to me. He and Mirri were consoling each other. “That’s absolutely it, old ooma. Blindfolds and thalldrapping worms.”
Thinta lay in a fountain of Joyousness, meowing, and Kley had come as a male, pathetic and inhibited, his eyes red. Hatta kept pouring me wine, wine the color of sapphires. “Drink up,” he said whenever I flagged. “Take another pill.”
If Zirk was there, I never saw him, or her.
Suddenly it was very late, about two hours before dawn, and I’d disappointed the Jang by not suiciding, which dismally cheered me.
“Danor,” I said, “let’s go back home. For the last time.”
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 speech 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.