by Tanith Lee
“Help?” I asked experimentally. There were no robots in sight, naturally. “Look,” I said tremulously to the advancing foe, “I think your family is derisann, but keep your feet off my blossoming waste, will you? And whatever you think I did, I didn’t.”
It reached me. I could gauge its size accurately now. It was exactly a head taller than me and rather more wide. Its eyes of deeply aqueous gray stared into mine, and it set its two front paws—compensating efficiently on the other six—upon my shoulders. Numb with fright, I stood my ground. They were quite light, those paws. At least it wasn’t giving a threat display.
“Er,” I said, “I only meant—”
Its mouth opened and a pale-pink tongue emerged, healthy and wholesome as a flower. It licked me.
Was it embracing me, or just using me as a balancing post? Why was it licking me so thoroughly? Its tongue was very nice, but I didn’t really want my face washed with it. Was it getting the taste?
“So kind—groshing—thank you,” I gabbled in a nauseating attempt to ingratiate myself.
Presently the licking stopped. I opened my screwed-up eyes and it patted me gently. Its paws left my shoulders. With one admonishing backward glance, scooping the little ones before it, the large Gray-Eyes went after its mates.
Feeling shaky with alarm, and laughter, I sat down in my tracks.
It was hopeless anyhow, they’d reached My Garden, and all was lost. Perhaps they wouldn’t damage everything—
“Idiot,” I said then. “Fool.” Admittedly I’d seen what they were at. But I should have guessed long before.
They would never wantonly harm anything growing, except the really stable fixtures of the desert, which they used for food and then only sparingly. They had a respect for vegetable growth, it was bred into them, and not surprising. After the rains, they hadn’t touched a thing, only danced in the lushest spots, had an orgy or two, played. And that was what they were going to do now, hold a post-rain rite. Because they thought it had rained, and somehow they’d missed it.
My Garden was going to be the scene of a celebration.
They wouldn’t make a lot of mess, probably add a bit of home-grown fertilizer here and there. Would they be able to adjust? What would happen when they realized the “rains” and the plant growth were going on and on? Had I wrecked their ecological thingammy?
Ah well. Too late now.
A few more came in through the unit, Gray-Eyeses, and some insects, and a couple of snakes. It gave me a lump in my throat the size of a small mountain.
* * *
—
It was the robot rescue bird-plane, swooping in and breaking the sound barriers, that ended the ritual.
Gray-Eyeses and friends, sped, wriggled, and flew in all directions, and vanished like sorcery in the dunes.
A door opened in the plane and a machine rolled forth, robot voice-box patronizingly announcing: “Help is at hand,” or something.
I tried not to glare as it began to fix my ship.
* * *
—
What can I say? How can I record the dream as it evolved everywhere about me, record it, and yet keep the dream intact? I could state every event as it occurred, every tiny and wondrous event.
The first bud opening, the first great ferns stretching for the sky, black-green on blue-green. Me bubbling like a thalldrap to one of my overtaxed, constantly reprogrammed robots: “I think this one’s going to be a tree, a real tree.”
Or there was the morning the sandstorm came, first like a golden gauze across the distant mountains, with Dopey staring admiringly at it, “My, that’s pretty,” until presently it smashed into us, wham, and flayed everything to within an inch of its life. Robots and me, swathed in bits of see-through to protect our eyes/optic circuits and lungs/chest valves, scurrying along between the slender irrigation canals we’d only just finished digging. (Brilliant notion gleaned from remembered antique manuscripts in the History Tower, these channels take water to the farthest reach of a plantation. They’re meant to come from rivers, I believe, but we had to keep them filled from the water mixer. They were backbreaking to dig: I ached for ten units in muscles I never knew I had. The robots got stiff and fed-up, too, and needed oiling.) For about an hour we plunged around, tying things down and draping things over things, and six or seven times I trotted into the ship and shrieked down the monitor beam for a wave-net protector, which performance met with neither applause nor success. Luckily the plants, or most of them, nourished on so much liquid, withstood the storm.
Shall I mention the units I simply sat, watching the swaying green, or wandered through it, sometimes trailing the perambulating “Rain”? The water mixer plus housing had now been adapted for mobility, and followed its allotted course, looking most curious and spectacular, and from the distance, perfectly like some fabulous monster. A great gleaming white cupola, stalking transparent steel-glass legs, mother-of-pearl nozzles waving from its crown, spraying delicate mists of water, stopping at the newer areas for more prolonged sprays, then making inexorably onward. At night it returned to rest beside the ship, humming to itself as it made fresh tankfuls. It, too, was overworked. It could, in fact, despite my plans, patrol and moisten only a short distance from its daily supply north, west, east, and south from the ship, a round tour of about four miles. I’d need eight or nine more water mixers to realize a decent job of watering the arid wastes, and hadn’t I just tried to get them?
“Your request cannot be granted,” said the monitor computer, and said it again. And again. And…
“Found out what a femur is yet, dumb-cluff?” I infuriatingly asked it, and heard the poor thing go rattling off to itself. The routine never varied and I never got the water mixers. I once tried pretending the first had met with an accident—fallen down a fault or off a mountain, I forget—but they checked us via the monitor system, and discovered it merrily stumping about on the eastern perimeter of My Garden spraying efficiently, so that didn’t work either.
Even those few miles, however, the sight and scent of them. Everywhere the water fell vegetation grew. A young forest was coming up to the east, and, starting just below the ship and spreading a quarter of a mile, tall, tall, slim trees, many-ridged trunks the color of dark jade and leaves thin as whips, strung like strips of green glass over the sky, making incredible patterns as they crossed and recrossed each other in the breeze. Flowers, too, every shade and hue, as the old books used to say. Some were climbing the veranda struts, and soon I wouldn’t be able to move the sand-ship even if I decided to.
About thirteen units after the robot rescue plane had rehabilitated my vessel-home, a small avalanche took place over on the eastern slopes of the mountains, and the faintest of tremors disturbed the ground. Off went the alarms in the ship, and everything tried to dive for safety and found it couldn’t, since I’d switched out the automatic drive.
When I’d quietened the sirens, I had to face a fact or two about the earthquake-prone terrain. I could stabilize the ship, mobile or static, but what about the Garden out there?
We’d begun to get quite handy and capable, the three robots and I. (I’d given them names by then, as I’d known I would, and programmed them to respond to them, and I chatted away at them, too, just as I’d feared. Still, it was eccentricity rather than desperation, and it had practical uses, for they came now at a name-shout, and if I told one to fix supper I could specify, and the other two—who might be hoeing with me outside or something—wouldn’t fling down tools and charge off as well. They were known as Jaska, Borss, and Yay, the tags of three ancient chieftains Assule had once spoken of during the Archaeological Expedition. Assule had been a bore, but somehow the names stuck, maybe only because it was so boring: so Jaska this, and Borss that, and Yay the other. I think they were related or buried together, I can’t recall.) Anyway, Jaska, Borss, Yay, and I, along with machinery borrowed from the ship, began to try t
o manufacture stabilizers of our own out of materials got from Four BEE under false pretenses.
I told the monitor beam how sad and droad I was. I said I was going to design a charming little tower as a hobby. Could they let me have some steel of something and silk of something else? Oh, and some weeny components, nothing much. I’d worked out that, so long as they thought I was up to something deadly, piffling, and useless, they’d let me do it, and I was proved right, for piece by piece, out came great crates of stuff for my “tower.” I supposed they’d concluded that when I got purposeful about things, I also got violent, and upheaval followed, and I supposed probably they had a point. However, Jaska, Borss, Yay, and I got to work on the load, using one of the ship’s stabilizers taken apart as a model, and, some units later, we began to dig holes and put down our first efforts. Only when disaster struck would I know if we’d got the formula correctly, but it looked right. I even wondered if we could build the extra water mixers ourselves, but it would mean stretching the tower-myth out rather thin, and also dismantling the existing mixer for a blueprint, and if any of us messed it up, we’d have no mixer at all. So, for the time being, a four-mile circumference of greenery it was going to have to remain. Anyway, that was fairly tiring.
Most days I went out with J, B, and Y and we turned over the soil—it really was starting to look like soil, too—and inspected growth, and tied weaker things to steel sticks, and made a note of where looked the most parched so the water mixer could give it an additional blast. Though the oxygen was invigorating even under the adolescent, burgeoning shade, it got very hot, and after a morning of it I would stagger off someplace and swoon away for an hour. Sometimes I would find a recumbent Gray-Eyes swooning there before me. I never knew if I met the original Gray-Eyes Mark I; it hadn’t come to the ship again, certainly, which was, no doubt, as well. I was too busy to mourn or be glad at its absence, too involved in the project to be lonely.
My beautiful body got more tanned. I was the essence of dark honey now, and my fair hair bleached to milky amber with fiery streaks in it like decorative silver chains. The poet’s eyes were two iridescent, almost colorless blue pools in that dark face. Mirrors made me jump even more, though a couple of exhausted evenings I lay on my veranda staring in one through the fading red charcoal of dusk. Sexuality hadn’t been much of a problem yet. I was too worn out. The love machine had cobwebs on it, or would have if the ship’s cleaners didn’t burnish everything nearly skinless. Still, the reflection of the beautiful girl with the eyes of the beautiful young man I had formerly been induced in me a kind of sinuous excitement I was going to have to beware of.
Thriving on water, every day the growing green rose higher and stood more strongly. Forest leaves tapped on my cabin windows, which faced out now, for I’d replaced the brocade with glacia-view. My window gazed southeast, like the veranda. I could see the dawn come up like rubies and limes behind the serpentine trees. And, if I had gone to my couch, the Sisters generally woke me with their sullen guns and villainous red hairdos so far across the valley.
What can I say? Maybe not all that.
This is a kind of retaliation, isn’t it, to that other screed of mine, composed in Limbo twelve vreks before in distress and query? That—the question. This—the answer. Or part of the answer, for all my life will be a reply, to myself and to my world.
Maybe, though, I should only say that a vrek passed by across my valley, a hundred units. And that one day I went out of the ship, and I saw everything with a kind of unexpected clarity, as if I hadn’t seen it before, hadn’t watched it grow, or helped it.
The sun was blazing down already, that cruel unbiteable sun. Black mountains cradled the valley, and a rim of glistening sand. Within that, My Garden, like a green smoke drawing nearer, and, as it neared, seeming a vegetable city with domes and towers, avenues and arcades, palaces and porticos, and a couple of Gray-Eyeses were running about in them, being careful not to tread on anything.
I was totally ready to cry, being, as I said, sentimental and a floop. Just then the monitor beam signaled me, a rare occurrence, so I packed away my emotion and went to investigate.
I had corrupted the computer too, so much was obvious.
It said only two words, but with such triumph, almost obscenely:
“Thigh bones.”
8
First unit of my second vrek in the valley.
Me on the veranda eating melon pancakes, thinking lazily of the work we were going to do today, Jaska, Borss, Yay, and I.
Water mixer on the prowl, dimly visible through an early haze, now and again hidden by trees, ferns, shrubs. A confused snake courting itself in the grass about nine feet off. Nose to tail: “Come on, give us a kiss.” The tail coyly refusing.
Then a familiar-unfamiliar sound in the sky, the snake going stiff as a ramrod, and I walking out and staring up.
Sometimes bird-planes had passed over, actually far to the west. Rarely did you catch their noise. Purely at random, I had established my haven well off the sand-ship and plane routes. This abomination, however, was directly overhead and presently swooping earthward.
Farathoom, and similar oaths. Watch out for the purple trees! (I had a name for everything—generally analogous. This saved muddle. Sometimes.) No, the purple trees had escaped barbering. The thing was going to land right in the cactus roses. It did.
Pancake still in hand, I thudded from the porch and ran to the plane. Very garish it was, and drizzling colored neons, but I didn’t bother with that.
“Get the Infinity off my flowers, blast you! Look what you’ve done.”
The anticipated robot voice came melodiously from the opening door:
“No need for alarm.”
“I’m not alarmed. But you’re going to be if you don’t move that tin can of yours.”
Just then the visitor emerged, a roly-poly machine, somehow conveying broad smiles, wires waving, lights popping on and off. It had Flash Center written all over it.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Some soup-brained promok spotted a fern in the desert, and mentioned it to some other Older promok at a Flash Center, and now they’ve sent a reporting machine to collect some pulchritudinous flashes to be pulchritudinously flashed all over Four flooping BEE. Yes?”
“Oh, yes,” chortled the flash machine, programmed by some incorrigible moron to sound like the worst type of human jolly. They probably thought the distraught Outcast would be glad to chirrup away to something human-sounding, however obnoxious.
“Well, old ooma, you can just hop back on your plane and go,” I said, “before I turn the water mixer on you.”
The flash machine looked uneasy somehow. Maybe it wasn’t rustproofed.
“Oh, but please. Everyone’s ever so interested. There’s even going to be a special interruption to Picture-Vision, and a perma-film of all this put on for five whole splits.”
That rocked me. The last time that had happened had been when—when—well, when? Ever? Surely the Committee hadn’t thought this up? Perhaps people were interested, or some people. Perhaps Danor might want to know how I was making out. Or Hergal. Yes, I could just see Hergal, reclining somewhere, semi-ecstatic, with golden limber limbs elegantly stretched like one of Thinta’s cats. He might even get romantic over me for half a split now I was in noncombatant female form. Thinta, on the other hand, liked me less that way. Possibly she would mutter something like: “I tried and TRIED with her. I did all I could. But she wouldn’t listen.” It hurt to think of them, but it was a pain I’d have to get used to. I couldn’t always just shut off whenever some image of the city stole up on me. Sometime I’d have to face it. But part of me had warmed. I looked at the flash machine differently.
“Well,” I said, “if you’ll shift that plane over a bit, and let me do the talking.”
“Of course!”
“And could you readjust slightly, and speak more in the fri
gid supercilious vein I’ve become used to with machines? Oh, and I’ll need half an hour to get ready.”
* * *
—
Vanity.
Oh, well, the first chance I’d had to be vain for over a vrek. Could be the last chance, too.
A good machine can rustle up clothing in fifteen splits if you know how to inspire it. I’d long since got out of wearing traditional Jang see-through in BEE, so I’d had lots of practice in the art. The ship clothing machine, left in the wall till now, nearly went zaradann, and threw off a gown of syntho-silk the color of fresh snow and embroidered with zircons. The cosmetics chute had fun, too, and tossed jeweled bottles of this and that at me with a disarming, childish delight. My feminine side had reestablished itself with a vengeance.
I emerged back into the outdoors, looking unbelievably glamorous and confident, eyelids enameled, earlobes spangled, and even the calluses rinsed off my ringed hands with medicinal salve. This was how Danor and Hergal and the rest were going to see me, if see me they did. Prosperous, fortunate, desirable, happy. And out of reach.
“You have been three half-hours instead of one,” stated the flash machine.
“Oh, good. You’ve reprogrammed to sound unpleasant. That’s a relief.”
“No I have not, but my batteries will go flat if—”
“If we waste any more time, so let’s get going.”
Full tour. Everything. They’d cut it later, anyway. Five splits! What could they show in five splits? Just enough, maybe.
Trees in a stasis of showering green, irrigation canals sparkling like crystal, the monstrous water mixer lifting on its legs and striding off, a solitary Gray-Eyes caught napping in the fern. Me, pampered and relaxed. Jaska and Borss digging Yay out of a subsidence. (“You’d better cut that.” Bet they wouldn’t.) Fruit ripening—no, I didn’t know what it was, but as it had grown here on the north side where the original water-and-provision spout had erupted, possibly some of the semi-constructed food had taken root or whatever it did. I’d be testing soon to see if it was edible.