by Tanith Lee
“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 your 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 succour all across the burning waste.
In the end I feel 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.”
There really was a sort of overcharge then. But the computer surmounted it.
“Why do you request this?”
“Because, my perma-steel friend, I’m going to make the desert waste blossom!”
* * *
—
The silence which followed was predictable and far from pleasing. But I stuck it out, knowing they had to listen, couldn’t just leave me there; I’d got the Q-R Committee by their service-to-humanity-programming curlies. Though a menace, I was human, and I had a need, so—
The displacement machine had been an inspiration. It was a body displacer, of course, meant for people use, but since hardly anyone does use them because of the violent nausea that generally results, they are sometimes recruited for sending intercity hardware about. (Dematerialize on Angel Walk in BAA, rematerialize smack in Peridot Waterway, BEE, but that sort of mistake doesn’t happen often, only when some Employed Older Person pops the wrong button.) If I could make them agree to my demands, BEE could shoot that water mixer out into my valley inside half an hour, and since water mixers are the stuff of life everywhere, it shouldn’t be so hard to find one—or make one—by noon. Then, oh then—a nourishing rain could fall, and my garden—yes, I really thought of it already as My Garden—could go on growing, and, what is more, go on and on. If the desert yielded so verdantly after one night of rain, what couldn’t happen here?
I was fired, ablaze with enthusiasm.
I beat the computer down—and the Q-Rs clustered by it now, I should imagine.
“I can’t see a friend, can’t even talk to a friend,” I histrionically bawled. “Alone in the sands, and all I want to do is water a bit of real garden.” (Boo-hoo)
There came at length a long long silence. From that silence, I knew I’d won. The computer spoke:
“For this item there will be a charge. You will have to pay.”
I was het up enough at that moment they probably realized they’d get a mass of utilitarian energy from me, even on tape.
“Yes. Plug me in and I’ll pay.”
And I did. I gave them their water mixer’s worth, and double. I sobbed and laughed and blessed them, and called down upon the city the joys of the firmament. It was worth it, and I didn’t even know then how worth it it was going to be.
7
The paid-for water mixer arrived in the afternoon, with a low thud of displaced air. They’d aimed it at a spot about halfway along My Garden and just enough to the south of it to avoid crushing or smashing any of the growing stuff. The positioning was so perfect, I thought they must have made a mistake. They’d probably have liked to materialize the water mixer smack in the middle of everything, including me.
It was a big machine, too, everything I’d hoped for, and stylishly housed under an elegant ice-white cupola with pillars and steel-glass all about below, and doors that were set to open only to me or my robots. We wouldn’t have any dear little desert animals barging in here, at least. The adaptors were excellent, too, and took my instructions like a miracle.
For an hour then, distant hummings and skitterings within the cupola, after which it finally happened. Vents swung wide in the dome, mother-of-pearl nozzles emerged like questing trunks, and fine, wide-spread jets of ready-mixed water began to fall, not only on My Garden but also on the dry, southwestern side of the water mixer, so perhaps I should be seeing another My Garden come up there as well, sooner or later.
I didn’t know how much moisture would be needed, but the best method seemed to be, since it was intended as a long-term policy, little and often, with a rest by night for the machine to fix a fresh supply. (Water mixers synthesize their components from any rubbish to hand, and refine and intermingle them dextrously in the old water formula known even to the ancients. Anything can be made in this way, and it’s a pity no one realized this fact before they’d completely drained the seas and the soil.)
Pride was not in it as I paraded the rocks around the ship, watching the “Rain.”
See, ooma Garden, it wasn’t a betrayal after all.
It was going to be about a mile west to north now, in addition to stretching half a mile from the ship.
Then the grand ideas started to come. Why not more? Why not My Gardens on every side, why not a valley of My Gardens? I might be able to get further water mixers from the city, if I confused the computer enough, or, failing that, get this one mobile, and wheel it about, doing shifts—two hours on the western land, two hours east, two hours south, etc.
Perhaps nothing would grow after all. The dunes couldn’t all be so fertile. (Don’t kid yourself, remember the rains—green everywhere.) And the valley was how big? An oval roughly, about ten miles maybe north to south, eight miles west to east. A tight schedule for one water mixer. But if it were all fertile in the end, all green…
Interruption to reverie was sudden and unexpected, though it shouldn’t have been.
It was a laughable and terrifying sight.
Chu
gging along from the area obscured behind the ship, and making quite obviously for My Garden and the water-mixer housing, came what must be described as a tribe of Gray-Eyeses.
There were about twenty of them, all physically alike, except for grotesquely varying sizes—several were as small as a Jang girl’s hand, two or three as large as a double float-bed. Demeanor seemed to accord with girth. The small ones tumbled and bounced and sometimes paused for boxing matches with each other till some adult (?) superintended them back into line. The big ones had a look of solemnity, even menace. The ones in between broke into fits of either mood, now stem, now downright balmy, clocking each other around the jowls, then striding on with a regal air, noses aloft.
Had they come to get me? What had Gray-Eyes Mark I been telling them?
However, they ignored me, though they knew I was there. (You couldn’t miss the pointed way they sniffed upwind; it made me feel like dashing back in the bath unit.) What they were interested in, as I had first feared, was the rising of green.
Now what? Run into the Transparency Tower and activate a defense mechanism, something like the shock wall that had killed the pet? See their lemon bodies drop in ecstatic death, before they could tear up the precious shoots? No, I couldn’t do that. Couldn’t, couldn’t and wouldn’t.
Feeling stupendously brave in my cowardly way, I bounded down the rocks toward the procession, waving my arms and shouting: “Shoo! Grak off! Get out of it!” To which there was a thoroughly stunning response of complete uninterest.
I was almost on top of the Gray-Eyeses now, and dementedly picked up handfuls of sand which I flung over them. There was a reaction to this. A few of the smaller—younger?—Gray-Eyeses ran up and began to turn somersaults about my feet, which, despite everything, nearly undid my resolve to be fierce and adamant. And then a large one looked back, registered the action, and returned doggedly toward me. Now he/she would assume that I was massacring his/her offspring, or whatever they were, and floor me with one enormous paw.