by Tanith Lee
“Come on, then. Here’s my list, a whole boxload of it. Let’s not grak about.”
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 woken 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-Vision, 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.
On the sand-ship runs, the glacia-view of the towers clouds and clears in spasms, to lessen the shock. Most passengers go crazy and foam at the mouth when they see the desert: I never had, and my hauteur had known no bounds. But this time I’d been hoping, I think, that the glacia-view would be opaque. However, it was night outside, and the towers stay clear nocturnally, presumably judging everyone a-bed.
Desert night. Yes, I’d forgotten.
Pale sand hills, seas of sand under the stars, black crags supporting black sky. To the west, one of the ubiquitous eruptions going on, but so distant as to be only an enlarged sequin on the dark. And yes, it was powerful, beautiful, but it was unfriendly, cruel, vast, limitless. And I was afraid. It wasn’t like the dream.
Nowhere to run now, but to this inhospitable land.
Go to the sand and say: Help me. Go to the rock and ask it for love and kindness.
The stars stare down, the bones of the planet stare up, and I am caught between as if on the points of two daggers.
The tower, clear on every side and above, seemed swimming around me in a blur of black and paleness. I clutched at objects in panic, as if to prevent myself from falling from a great height, and accidentally activated a siren which went whooping off in the ceiling. This saved me, by a hair’s breadth, from something I had no name for, pure insanity, maybe. I bashed at buttons, and the siren relapsed into silence. Then, I fled from the tower and into my safe cabin with its window-spaces of solid blue brocade.
I lay among the gauzes of the anchored float-bed, crying soundlessly. For, having come to fight the desert, I couldn’t even face it now, I, who had danced, so long ago with my pet, among its rain-green dunes.
* * *
—
Three units and three nights we ran, the ship and I. I lay on my bed and the machinery rocked me, and fed me pills to make me sleep, and injected me with meals, and wiped away my tears with anodyne sponges.
“How kind of you,” I sniveled to it, forgetting I had set the switches for this care, and wanting to forget.
The third night I dreamed I was in a great hall. Outside the hall stood people, not from the cities but from the desert, ghosts of the nomads that had wandered about there eons back. The hall had many tall windows, each of which was thickly curtained. But the curtains kept drawing themselves open, and then the nomads would intently gaze in at me. I went from curtain to curtain, closing them again, but as soon as I pulled one pair together, another pair would part.
At the hall’s center stood a table with a flagon on it, and in the flagon, bright-blue wine. I knew if I could get to the table and swallow the sapphire liquor everything would be all right. But somehow, I wasn’t permitted to drink while the people outside were watching. And the curtains opened and opened.
Finally my eyes opened, and I was awake.
A crystallize chronometer had been set going in the wall by one of the robots, part of normal sand-ship-run procedure. It wasn’t on city time, but desert time, and it told me that among the geography outside, dawn had come.
I swung off the bed and stamped into the bathing unit. I splashed and brutalized myself under freezing jets, was dried and almost accidentally creamed, powdered, and perfumed by wild machines that leaped on me from the walls. In my cabin, a meal-injection, and four oxygen tablets downed in a pint or so of fire-and-ice.
I strode toward the forward end of the ship. Coming to the bank of switches, I almost wavered, but the dream had infuriated me. There was, after all, no sapphire wine of forgetfulness here. With a flailing hand I spun a dial, and thereby indicated to the ship that it must stop.
An immediate sighing among the motors. A soft shuddering. Presently, stillness, broken only by quiet settling noises. I stood there, as if waiting for the crack of doom.
Come on, doom’s not in here.
Suppose, I thought, suppose I’ve stopped us right on top of an erupting volcano. But, of course, the ship would automatically have adjusted such an error, overridden my order, and dashed to a safer spot. No good trying to get out of it that way.
The doors slid back with a subtle hiss, as if trying to catch my attention.
No need, I was hooked already.
I looked out, and my legs turned to water, but I gripped the doorway and went on staring.
“Come on, ooma,” I was burbling to myself, “you weren’t scared before, you liked it before. How derisann, you said. Merely observe the majesty of the mountains, all black and jagged on the turquoise sky. Concentrate on the horizon, the color of those special rose sweets Thinta used to eat. And the sand. Go down and touch the sand. How groshing it is, isn’t it? Come on, you bitch.”
I tottered down the ramp and half fell, strengthless, on my knees. The sand felt dry and brittle, each grain separate and individual, pressed into my skin. The atmosphere also was dry and brittle, already hot from the risen furnace of the sun, and the rocks were blistering.
“No, don’t look at the sun. Remember, you can’t, not like a dome sun. Now, a bit at a time. Just start with the sand.”
Air whistled around me. The planet appeared to spin in slow arcs that I could actually see and experience. When I lifted my watering, barely focused eyes to the horizons, the mountains seemed to tilt, about to collapse on me. The sand sifted through my fingers. The rocky ground beneath me, at least, felt almost stable.
Breathe shallow, remember, don’t strain to get extra lungfuls: the tablets will take care of the oxygen. No, the mountains aren’t falling, nor is the sky. I won’t be beaten. No I won’t.
Then I raised my head slowly again to face the land, and I screamed.
It was standing there, eight-legged, on a rock. Hardly a petrifying sight, obviously scared half out of its own probably limited wits. About the height of my kneecap, pale lemon in color, its fur standing out from its body like a brush in fright or surprise. Two gray eyes of incredible innocence and a chocolate ruff completed the enchanting picture.
My heart swelled. I’d forgotten the animal population of the desert. At BOO they trap desert beasts, attempt to train and tame them, and sell them in the Fours as pets. My pet had been
such a one. More interesting and more trouble than an android creature, pets frequently run amok in the streets of the cities, biting all and sundry.
“Attlevey, beastie,” said I, in the voice of a saccharine floop. I was trembling at the contact, at the live presence so near to me, when I thought I should never see or touch anything live again. How I ached to grab that ludicrous furry real body. “Are you hungry, beastie? Fancy a little snack? Wait there, pretty beastie. Don’t go ’way.”
Making the most absurd gestures of patience and supplication, I crawled backward, scrambled up the ramp and into the ship, and flew madly for the provision dispenser.
What would it like? Nut pate? Salad-on-ice?
I loaded a platter with messy, hastily prepared delicacies, and stole back to the doors. Would it have run off?
At first I couldn’t see it, and desolate tears burned my lids. Then I spotted its lemon form, lying backward on a nearby rock, sunning its stomach, and looking at me upside down with pop eyes.
“Here, pretty, pretty. Come and try the nice first meal maker’s brought you.”
I recall, with nauseated shame, my antics. How I crept about on the sand, hoping to approach. How it bounced upright, eight legs set for retreat. How I fell back, apologizing.
I finally deposited the plate about ten paces from the ship, and removed my obviously leprous and unwanted presence to the doorway. Where I sat, motionless, watching.
Lemon-furred Gray-Eyes remained upright about half an hour, pointed nose pointedly in the air. Eventually, with a proud and aloof demeanor, Gray-Eyes pattered up to the food and began to eat. Pausing only once, when I ventured to congratulate it, to direct at me a look of disdainful warning: Shut up, or I go.
Witnessing Gray-Eyes golluping made me hungry, but I didn’t dare leave the doors in case it was gone when I returned.
Soon the food platter was empty, and Gray-Eyes, having licked it pristine and turned it over to make sure there wasn’t some other tasty bit of something on the reverse side, sat down and began to wash. A fascinating sight, particularly since none of the eight legs seemed terribly well coordinated with the others. Perhaps Gray-Eyes was very young, or perhaps it just didn’t care.