by Tanith Lee
“Peculiar,” I agreed.
It transpired that finally the idea had come to Danor—ignore the Committees and fly the cities, and live for love in the wild. They’d just come around to the notion when my film was flashed out. It made a sensation—which it hadn’t been meant to, at least not in the way it did. Possibly the Committee had allowed the film in the hopes that I, emaciated and dolorous with despair, would provide a nice extra example of what unsocial tendencies got you. Or possibly even, if I looked fairly healthy and jolly, people might stop worrying and debating about me, and get on with the droad city round. But—
“Half the Jang went running about on the mono-rails immediately after,” said Danor, “screaming and shouting. There were sixty-eight sabotages of the dome that night, and sand and volcanic ash and a couple of earthquakes got through. About forty Older People went crazy as well, and got roaring drunk in your honor, and drove the Q-Rs mad at Ivory Dome saying they wanted to get married to each other.”
“A historic evening,” said Kam. “In the morning the Committee signaled Danor, informed her that she and I had been registered as together once again, and must part for our own sakes.”
“So we said we were leaving,” said Danor.
“At which the Committee,” said Kam, “accused us, in a most extraordinary tone, of planning to join you in dangerous, out-dome, anti-city activities, and that, if we left, it would be assumed we also wished for permanent exile. Like you, we could expect aid and supplies, and like you, we could expect to remain outcast until natural death placed us at the Committee’s mercy for PD.”
“God,” I said.
Kam looked at me.
“That’s a very old concept.”
“So is the concept of androids working against people. But it sounds to me as if the Committee is boiling all over its electronic brain casings.”
“Quite,” said Kam.
“So why ever did you come?” I asked, breathless (breathless and girlish beneath these charming eyes I would have to accept as paternal or fraternal). “Knowing—what would happen.”
“I said they could be damned,” he told me, “and Danor said much the same, with a few colorful Jang adjectives thrown in. Because I want her with me, and she wants me, and if the only way we can have each other is by leading what, after all, used to be a perfectly normal life, then that’s the way it’s going to be. If you’ll befriend us, you’ve got a willing pair of hands for your greenery out there, two pairs, in fact. If not, and we realize you might rather not, we’ll go and try to get something started elsewhere, the way you have. The growth rate of vegetation in the desert is phenomenal, which has always been known, and accepted, and entirely ignored by everybody but yourself.” He was really getting going. I loved watching him. Better to have a crush on Danor’s Kam than on a flooping robot. “I admire the way you’ve organized this,” he said to me, and I glowed, choosing to forget the fact that almost everything had occurred as a result of accident, mismanagement, and idiocy on my part. “I’d like to help, and Danor would. And I’ll tell you something else. Four BEE blew to the skies the night they showed the film. There are going to be others coming out here, too. Plenty of them.”
2
Naturally, I told them to go. Go on, I said, who wants the company of sweet-natured girls and delectable males, both of whom praise me, and offer help for hearth and land, and promise further comrades to come, and who make me laugh and want to hug them sick? Well, obviously, I didn’t do any such zaradann thing.
We sat a long while over our white alcohol in Kam’s bird-plane. We got a little drunk and made drunken plans. I said they must come and live on the ship, for now at any rate. Plenty of cabins, I said. All colors of the rainbow—yellow, scarlet, apricot—but maybe they’d better have the violet one, it would tone with Danor nicely. And they’d be able to insist to Four BEE that they have a water mixer. Two, even. One for the home, one to make shrubbery. The Committee, if they hadn’t denied it to the Outcast Killer, surely couldn’t deny them? Naturally, they’d have to move out of my vicinity temporarily, in case the Committee monitored their position. (A beam had been installed compulsorily on the plane, so they could call for aid, etc.—or was it to spy on their activities?) While we were in proximity with each other, the Q-Rs would tell us to share my water mixers, but if Danor and Kam were over the mountains at the time, the city must deliver. Then, once the goods had arrived, my guests could return, plus water mixers, and we’d have three lots of “Rain” for the Garden. This seemed very logically worked out, and rather sharp. Kam congratulated me again on being devious.
It got latish, and suddenly the Sisters went off with their usual thump and the unopaqued windows pulsed with distant red. I’d been impressed by the windows and the arrivals’ lack of phobia. Love had sustained them? They didn’t jump much, even now. However, reaction to the Sisters expressed itself from another quarter. From somewhere aloft exploded Danor’s swan.
I’d forgotten the swan, and so had they, it seemed. Perhaps they’d slipped it something to keep it quiet on the journey out. Currently awake, it raced gawkily for the exit, and fled from the plane. Once outside, it burst into klaxon sneezes. Probably it had a pollen allergy.
Danor was concerned, and Kam practically helpless with laughter; I somewhere between. It looked as if the swan might well be a child substitute, too, for Danor, since she and Kam could never become makers in the city. Recalling my pet, and the horrendous adventure with the devil of the provision dispenser, I eventually sympathetically followed Danor down the ramp, out into the night.
Danor called to the swan across the dark, intermittently volcano-lit spaces of the whispering Garden. In reply, from odd nooks, eyes sparked gray (Gray-Eyeses, obviously) or gold (snakes). The swan meanwhile could be heard faintly klaxoning to the left and plodding stolidly over everything growing at ground level from the sound of it. I recalled that old fear of mine—that real desert animals might attack an android version, outraged at it for its weird similarities and differences.
“Danor,” I said, “I’ll get it; I know the paths,” and shot into the undergrowth.
I was going quite fast, despite Kam’s alcohol, when the klaxon ejections abruptly ceased, but right then I spotted the swan.
It was lying full length, swan-fashion, on the earth, and, for a second, I thought it was dead, and nearly let out a screech of primeval woe, as once before, so long before, yet clear as yesterday. More clear. The pet lying dead, and I—
But no, the swan wasn’t dead. It was lifting its brainless, elegant head, rubbing its neck on the stem of a tall flowering cactus—thankfully not of the prickly variety. And now the swan was rolling on the cool, water-mixer-moistened soil. Its plumage was filthy already and it had petals stuck all over its beak. But unmistakably it looked glad, in the throes of genuine haphazard pleasure.
I hefted it under one arm with difficulty, and took it back to Danor.
One hour later she and I had it in the bathing unit, flapping and flailing, as we rinsed our future from its lavender quills.
3
The bird-plane took off in the morning. Watching it go, even knowing they would be back, something shivered in me. But I put my stale fright aside. I wasn’t going to be alone anymore. Danor and Kam, and others, plenty of others, so Kam had said. My head was ringing with elation.
They planned to put down just on the other side of the nearest ridge eastward, signal BEE on their monitor-beam, and let fly with all the jargon we’d thought up for the water mixers. Then Kam was going to adapt it—or them—as I had done, merely a matter of reprogramming them.
After that the bird-plane would return, followed at length by one (or two) water mixers, striding like terrifying beasts from a myth across the mountains into the valley. If Kam could inveigle the computer, as I had done, into using a displacement machine for delivery, the whole thing could be over and done by sunset tonight.
>
Tonight I would dress for company. So I spent about an hour during second meal with the clothing machine, arranging for smoke-amber satin-of-glass with amethyst fringes. Most becoming. The cosmetic machine could do my hair too, curls and coils and pearls and things.
The swan had gone with Danor, blessings on it. Last night it had rolled right over some fresh young flowering shoots, which had somehow survived. Yay and I did our usual tour in the tracks of the water mixer. We wound up on the northwest side, examining the curious earth fruits, which were now ready to be picked and tested by the food equipment for edibility. Of course, they might be poisonous or nontoxic but foul. Still, they looked nice, succulent red and yellow, and some little green crispy leaves in huddles, a sort of sand-lettuce, not to mention the bizarre, gold-freckled, dark tubers swelling in the shade. Borss and Jaska staggered into the ship with armfuls of stuff to set the testing in progress.
The sun was high and hot by now, the sky the hard deep turquoise of noon. The mountains were like carvings from night left behind at dawn, the edgings of sand like powdered silver. And here light was raining in dapples of golden green through the tall trees. The trees were rising in avenues; there were glades and beds of flowers, as if the Garden had actually been designed, as if someone had left the seeds ready, buried in the dunes, formally laid out, each held in a dry time-pod until there should be enough prolonged water to break the spell and wake them. What an idea. Had someone? Some ancient, eccentric, brilliant ancestor of the cities, long before even the nomads violently trudged the waste?
Cogitating, up to my eyes in soil from the fruit picking, I suddenly heard the thrumming of a bird-plane, and looked heavenward. Danor and Kam back so soon?
No. This one was coming from the west. Coming roughly, perhaps, from the direction of Four BEE.
Off course, or playing air games. It would pass over.
A black speck in the burning green-blue sky, it resolved itself swiftly, showing its underside, dropping by hectic degrees. Someone was fiddling with the controls. Or, nervous, had screwed up the robot programming.
The plane swiveled slightly, and all at once dived. Instinctively I ducked, without real cause, as the vessel sliced the atmosphere above the trees. Was it going to crash? And on my prickly-fire bushes?
At the last possible split, the plane righted itself and flopped into an offhand landing in the grove of purple trees, about a hundred yards eastward.
I had been leaning on one of the metal things the robots rustled up to serve as hoes. Now, hoe in hand, soil on face and in hair, and combined interest, alarm, and ferocity in my glance, I made toward the belly-flopped plane.
They’d brought down some of the boughs, I furiously noticed, furious as a maker whose child has been bopped on the nose. Don’t tell me, the Garden is now a child substitute. The plane, however, appeared intact, its door stood open, and a wild din was emerging, a din you couldn’t actually hear.
Upper ear. Jang high-tonal-music tapes.
I reeled, swamped with giddy delight, scowling, and burst up the ramp into the plane, looking neither left nor right. I found the tape control instantly and, with the practice of vreks, smashed the button for silence. The mind-blowing horror receded. Shaking myself like a Gray-Eyes which has accidentally rolled in some cactus, I glared about.
“Attlevey,” voices murmured, silkily, joyfully.
The tiny plane, built to carry two, or three at the most, was crammed with five Jang. Their hair was shades of yellow, hyacinth, viridian, pink-orchid; the two females had long, long nails, the males’ nails were even longer. They wore see-through, chains, rings, bracelets, anklets. They were smoking incense through tubes from a weeny glass bubble fixed in the ceiling, their eyes were dark with ecstasy, and full flagons of Joyousness were clasped in their pretty paws. They smiled up at me from their semi-recumbent positions on the couches or each other, and their sequined faces were full of visions and mysteries, and shone with the pure radiance which only total imbecility can bring.
Oh. Beautiful.
“Attlevey,” they reiterated. A male with flowing dark-green locks waved his hand.
“I’m Naz. This is Felainnillaloxiandphy.”
“Oh yes,” I said.
“We know who you are,” he said.
“You do.”
“Oh, ooma-kasma, we do.”
I shrank. Effusive turd.
“Well, ooma-kasma,” I said, “I really think you actually don’t, or you wouldn’t be here.” A cold anger, not untinged by blind panic, had welled in my reinforced bones. “Just tell me, have you informed the Committee you were coming here?”
“Ooma-kasma,” drawled Naz, popping an extra pill down his gullet, “we went right in the Committee Hall, and oh infinity, did we like anything tell them. Listen, you thalldraps,” went on Naz, demonstrating, “you can all jump in the vacuum drift. We’re off to where everything is for real. You bet.”
“So they know you’re here. What did they say?”
“They said: If you go you can’t come back—oh—if you go you can’t come back—oh—” Naz discovered he had broken into an involuntary but apparently Naz-pleasing song, so went on. The other four, Felainnillaloxiandphy, joined in.
So there they were, a parcel of useless Jang idiots, entirely enmeshed in Jang mores and habits, intent on molesting my desert. Did they really realize what they’d done? That they had been exiled? “For real. You bet.”
“Do you have any link with the city?”
“Four BEE? Oh, yah, yah, ooma, my ooma. They put in a monitor beam in case we need any more ecstasy or incense,” Naz broke off his singing to reassure me. “Say, ooma, have a pill?”
“No. Get on your beam link and tell the computer you didn’t mean it. You want to come back.”
Naz broke off again. Something had penetrated.
“But we do mean it, ooma-kasma. And we don’t want to go back.”
“Yes you do. Have you looked out yet?” Their windows were as opaque as their brains. Maybe they’d get agoraphobiafied and throw up all over the grove, but at least they’d leave afterward. How could the Committee refuse them reentry? After all, they seemed model citizens to me.
Inspired by the suggestion, they were scrambling about, agile and luminous, and nearly trod me under their sparkling feet as they dashed into the great outdoors.
It was worse, much worse, than I’d thought.
Not a trace of insecurity or fear.
They were wandering from tree to tree, flower to flower.
“Oh, ooma-kasma,” they were extolling each other, “just look at this, and this. Infinity, it’s all so groshing,” as they squashed flat the buds and picked the newborn blossoms to stuff in their abysmal hair.
Maybe the Gray-Eyeses would get them.
Maybe the snakes would strangle them.
Maybe the food tests would prove the fruits were poisonous, and I could feed them to the Jang: “Computer? I’m afraid I have five Jang here, suicided, ready for PD.”
They were swaying and swerving in the direction of the sand-ship, holding hands and pulling off leaves so they could admire them better.
“Ooma-kasma-maa!” they warbled back to me.
“Coming,” I grimly answered.
4
They but loved the ship. They’d never been in one before. They dived into the cabins and out of them. They flung open the doors to the pool-tank and dived into that and came out soaking wet. Two of them, the two females—Felainnilla—got hold of Yay and tried to dismantle him, with yipping recollections of previous city dome sabotage. Having stopped this, I found the other two males—Loxiandphy—had programmed a machine for some sort of bright mauve paint, and were painting with it all along the tasteful walls of the corridors things like THE DESERT WASTE IS COSMIC, OOMA or CACTUS COME AND EAT MY SOUL. They weren’t too hard to deflect, being smashed to the ver
y small back rooms of their tiny minds.
At last they flaked out in their entirety in the saloon, and I got clearing-up operations under way. I glanced in on the food tests, hopefully, but the poison analysis wasn’t complete and, in any case, looked as if it might be negative. Perhaps I could grate some syntho-something in their fifth meal.
For they’d ordered fifth meal from Borss, and it had come. Tucking in with good appetite, they bawled away about how wonderful it was to rough it in the wild, so clean, uncluttered, and fresh, ooma-kasma. Then a male with hyacinth tresses (Loxi) and the female of the pineapple curls (Felain) went rootling by on their way to clash nastily with the scarlet cabin. I just knew they’d very carefully married before they left BEE. Unable to resist having love in these bucolic surroundings, the dust-pink Nilla girl and Phy, a grim, macabre cobalt creature with jewelry to match, thudded out to the yellow cabin. Naz lay among the debris of nut-steak-on-fire and smiled in laconic fashion.
“Well, ooma-kasma. I know you don’t believe marriage is necessary first, so what about it?”
I still had the steel hoe in my hand; I showed it to him.
“I’ve been male enough times to know just where to aim so that it hurts,” I said. “Until I can get you off my patch, I realize I’m stuck with you, but don’t push your luck.”
Even I was not that desperate.
“Ooma, ooma,” sirened Naz, as if I’d injured his inmost id, “what a disappointment you are to me. You, the shining star of Four BEE’s Jang, and in such a becoming body.”
“Listen,” I said, “I know our teeth are reinforced, but unless you shut up, I’m definitely willing to try and knock yours right down your throat.”
* * *
—
I got the monitor beam going, but the computer took a while in coming on.