by Tanith Lee
“There’s been a mistake,” I informed it. “Five Jang have arrived here that didn’t mean to—a bird-plane malfunction. Can you send someone to take them back? I don’t think they’ll make it on their own.”
The computer rattled, then:
“Once they have made contact with you, they are to be considered as exiles.”
Its metallic voice-tape sounded altered somehow, even less approachable than before.
“God!” I shouted at it, to see what would happen.
“God is a primitive and untenable invention,” it promptly replied. Somebody had reprogrammed it. No longer was it a fascinated adversary, it was a cold, cold enemy who wouldn’t play games. From here on, its answer would, in every sense, be no.
“OK,” I said, “you’re being unfair and clunk-headed, but I expected nothing else. Go fry in your storage batteries.”
It never even twitched.
Thus, what? Here was I stranded with five awfuls, who would ruin my dream by sheer lack of personality. Yet they were outcast. And if I slew them (murderer, killer, why else were you cast from home and dome?) it was PD for them. And maybe even their barren little egos were dear to them.
If only Kam were here, Kam and Danor.
But they weren’t, and wouldn’t be till sunset at the earliest, and I had no means to signal them. I must cope solo.
There was a slender chance.
I went back into the saloon, where Naz lay stretched in midair on a float-cushion he’d got one of the robots to blow up for him.
“Changed your derisann mind, ooma-kasma?”
“Naz,” I said, “I think we ought to talk. I can tell you’re the mainstay of your circle. The others look up to you, don’t they? It was your decision to leave the city?”
I’d hit the target, fair and square. He smiled indulgently. Ecstasy had presumably faded from him a little, since he actually heard some of what I said.
“You know, ooma-kasma, you know. Well, they’ve got to have someone. I’m stronger—you think so?—than Phy—he’s the other predom male. Loxi’s just everywhere and on the moons. Nilla’s a girl, never anything but. Ultra-female, you know? Scratchy. Felain, she’s predom tangled-up. She suicided every day for a whole vrek, got so bad even the Q-Rs thought she’d done it mistakenly. Then they stuffed her in cold store for thirty units. Now she really only wants to go with Nilla, and Nilla won’t be a male, and Felain doesn’t want to be a male, and it’s a real live floop-show, ooma.”
I sat down. As he’d let all this out, a little streak of intelligent, bewildered compassion had shown on his face.
“It sounds bad,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Did I tell you Loxi starved himself to death in BAA? Took ninety units. And Phy gets melancholia in the dark. When it’s night, he’ll cry.”
“That will be something to look forward to,” I said; but my heart was rending me with its claws.
“As for me,” he said, “I don’t have problems. Life is just one gray-rose nebula from dawn to grakking dawn.” And before I could stop him, he’d shoveled handfuls of ecstasy down his throat and was soon floating in every direction, singing: “Oh, it’s great, ooma-kasma. The ceiling is full of little chandeliers—one, two, three, one, two, three…”
After this, any attempt to get through to him was a pointless exercise. It was only as I’d caught him on the down-surge of ecstasy that I’d got such a wild repercussion to my mild, would-be clever query.
But I could see their whole circle was in a right mess; not model citizens, just the normal kind, jollity and delight for the skin, neurasthenia in the joints.
Makerish again? Five child-substitutes?
Along the corridor, outside the apartments, shouts.
Beyond the closed yellow door, a groaning male voice entreating: “Nilla, Nilla, do it again.” By the closed yellow door, pineapple-curled Felain clenching her fists and yelling, and Loxi saying: “Oh, er, look, ooma, for my sake—”
Now ecstasy was wearing thin, their true human traits were showing, their foibles, bad nerves, and wretchedness. Felain was poorly insulated electric fire, Loxi, unideal partner, a tepid, nonquenching puddle.
I put back on the storm I’d lost with Naz.
“You two,” I raged, “if you want to live on my land and in my ship, you can just get used to taking orders from me.”
“Squiggle off,” said Felain, so I spun her around with one hand and smacked her in her delicate puss. I don’t like hitting people. They may hit you back. Besides, I didn’t want to damage her looks when she was now stuck with this body, and the healing salve was the sum total of what we had till a robot-rescue arrived to set her nose, or whatever.
A welt appeared on her damascene cheek, and having noted she wasn’t going to biff me, I felt shame ooze in my spine. But too late for shame, and it wasn’t too bad; would pale to nothing in half an hour.
“Now listen, and take this in. You poured off your plane, you trampled through the bushes, you picked the leaves and the flowers. So now you’re going to come with me and do some chores out there to make up for the damage. You, Loxi, minus your chains and bells, and you, Felain, in something the briars won’t rip off your back in three splits.”
Felain lowered her lashes and gave me an unmistakable look through them, so for a moment I felt I was almost back in my male poet’s body.
“Yes, ooma,” she said demurely.
“So. See to your clothes and get outside,” I gruffly added, resenting the muddle she was making of my hormones. Loxi flew to obey, and Felain slunk, provocatively.
Within, cries and moans reached a crescendo and dwindled.
“You two,” I said through the door, “are to be out on the veranda in twelve splits, dressed for hard work.”
“You’re kidding,” muttered Phy. “I’ve worked hard enough.”
But the crawler’s whine was in his voice.
Nilla, the dusky-pink delicacy, who obviously dominated both Phy and Felain, called sweetly:
“Twelve splits is too soon, ooma-kasma. Come in and we’ll show you why.”
So I opened the door and went in, demonstrating that I wasn’t to be intimidated.
Quite instructive it was, too, to one of my relatively modest tastes.
“Very artistic,” I said, “but you can still make the deadline. If you don’t, my robots, which I have programmed to take instructions only from me, will come and bring you out as you are, accessories and all.”
I hadn’t actually reprogrammed the robots and, having masterfully stridden forth, I rushed to do so. I put in an override order, too, in case anyone tried to block my block. Yay, Borss, and Jaska bore it with softly ticking forbearance.
After twenty-five splits. Felainnillaloxiandphy stood uneasily giggling and jostling in the porch, Naz having ecstasied into unconsciousness in the saloon.
I was going to have to teach them to garden, since there was nothing else I could do with them. At least they jumped when I spoke. Even Nilla was being cautious.
Felain sidled by, but I’d calmed myself. Poet no longer. Confront the facts, as a female, it was Hergal I wanted, wormwood truth I would now admit. Never mind. I’d got the upper hand with this lot, for a while anyhow.
And in about two hours the sun would set, and my friends would be coming home to save me from complete collapse.
5
The sun dropped like a jewel below the western horizon. There the mountains seem to sink back into the sands, leaving open that way to the cities from which, half crazy and running, I had come. A western horizon of tall dunes mounted on low rock, taller dunes since the sandstorm, maybe bare stone after the next.
Amber afterglow. Jang strewn along the veranda wailing about bones torn from sockets, muscles liquidized, sunburn. Luckily their skins—not one seemed to have designed a really desert-suited body—had no
t reacted too badly. Nilla, least burned of everyone, mewed that she was the worst burned. Felain rubbed salve into her, dreamily.
They’d worked very hard. Too hard for themselves, harder than they’d meant to.
Only Nilla still picked flowers. I’d seen her. Just like a child from hypno-school nicking a goody from under a Q-R’s nose. Nilla might be a handicap. I was fairly sure she’d done this predominantly female thing only in order to throw her circle off balance, in particular hapless Felain. Still, they were stuck with Nilla as a girl now, Nilla included.
Even Naz had loitered out onto the veranda. He lay on the pillowy couch, humming.
I’d had to warn them not to stare at the sun.
And now the sun had sunk.
I’d been so sure Danor and Kam would be back at this time that I’d been listening and looking around for several splits for their plane. Once I thought I heard it, but was mistaken. I’d been banking on their help in dealing with this mob, most of whom, I had the feeling, hadn’t been Jang for very long. Danor was about my age in Janghood, Kam, of course, older.
But the plane didn’t come. And didn’t come.
The sky emptied out into palest indigo. Stars burned through. The Jang, forgetting to grumble, stared at these phenomena silently, not taking ecstasy or howling about “This is where it’s at, ooma-kasma,” or anything. Even Naz was filling his drug-shadowed eyes.
“There’s no moon,” complained Nilla.
“So go up and make one,” Phy told her. He wasn’t crying with melancholia either. If he ever had.
Presently it was a mealtime, and they vaguely went off to eat it, like good children. I’d told them, attempting to intimidate them with numbers, that Danor and Kam would be here later, but they’d forgotten.
I stayed outside, watching, waiting.
The sky darkened. There was a silken rustle of subsiding sand about a mile away, the sound of it trickling easily across those spaces of quiet. The day had tired me out.
The Sisters woke me, punctual as ever. They woke the Jang, too, who had collapsed in comas of exhaustion in the saloon. They came hopping out to see the volcanic fireworks, half-scared, half-admiring.
“Your friends are late,” said Naz. “Got any ecstasy? I took all mine and the machines won’t dispense; say you programmed the robots to program them not to.”
“That’s it,” I said. “You can forego the ecstasy, or you’ll be unfit for work tomorrow.”
Naz, lethargically cursing me, meandered off.
No Danor, no Kam.
My guts had turned cold. Irrational. Anything could have delayed them. Most probably trouble with the newly set monitor computer. And yet, and yet.
“Ooh-weeh!” screeched Nilla at the Sisters, more or less in my ear.
I got up. I was going to check with the blasted computer, even if it did mean giving the water-mixer game away.
* * *
—
“I’m inquiring about some fellow exiles of mine,” I said. “Danor, female body from BEE, Kam, older male, BAA. They’ve put down over the mountains from me, eastward, I’m not precisely sure where. Have they been in contact with you on their monitor beam?”
Rattle. (Even the rattle sounded more efficient, more resolute.)
“They have.”
“When?”
Click.
“Computed time of desert noon.”
“Noon?”
“Noon.”
I wasn’t obviously going to get anything for free, so I sold us out.
“What did they want?”
“Two water mixers.”
“Oh—ah—how odd!” I, falsely amazed.
“The request was refused,” said the computer. “Their plane was given your coordinates and they were told to join you and share your water mixer.”
“Did they argue?”
“For approximately one hour.”
Good for Kam. I could imagine.
“Didn’t work, though, did it?”
“It did not,” said the computer, without even a metallic hint of satisfaction.
Heavy chill dark was thick around me, not entirely due to the night beyond the windows.
“So, if they were coming here, I could expect them pretty soon.”
Click, click. No answer.
“Well, shouldn’t I? Or earlier? About seven hours ago, in fact.”
“Unless they have decided to abide by Committee suggestion and order a home built where they are presently located, without growing things.”
“Don’t try and fool me. You know and I know it was a plot to get a water mixer for us here in the valley. And you know they should be back here now. Did they link with you again?”
“No.” Rattle, rattle. “Perhaps they have realized the enormity of what they have done, and elected for suicide and Personality Dissolution.”
A white wave broke over me. I cut out the beam link, and stood, holding my breath with tension. Suicide? Not them. So what had happened?
There was a noise on the veranda, shouts, excited thumpings. The Jang had apparently spotted something. Could it be the plane?
I sped veranda-wards, and emerged among an applauding, pointing melee of Felainnillaloxiandphy. Something had come over the eastern mountains and plummeted into the greenery about ten feet from the porch.
“Oh, look, it’s a desert bird,” they were inanely squawking.
“Out of the way, floops, it’s an android, and I know it.”
It was Danor’s swan.
I knelt by the swan, which, exhausted but apparently whole, was recovering in the grass.
“Oh God, swan, what’s happened?”
And the swan fluted: “You are the wonderful sun of my sky!” which sent the Jang morons into raptures. But not me. It was the warning song, the song which pleaded for aid.
When they saw my face, the Jang row ebbed.
“Naz,” I said, noting him full length on the pillowy couch.
“Sure, I’m awake,” said Naz. “Are you going to give me some ecstasy, ooma, my ooma, or your own nut-brown self?”
“Naz,” I said, “I think you’ve lived longer than the rest of your circle, and I think under your sprawling hide there lurks a spark of intelligence. You and your crowd foisted yourselves on me and I’m stuck with you and you’re stuck with me. Just over those mountains there, those low ones, a couple of friends of mine are in trouble. I don’t know what kind, but it must be bad. And their monitor beam is probably out so they can’t call for city help, all they can hope for is mine. Now, listen. I’m going to take Yay—the robot—and your bird-plane, and I’m going over east to look for my friends. While I’m gone, Naz, you’ll have charge of your circle. And if I come back and find you’ve ruined my ship or my Garden, I’ll tear you limb from limb and stuff the bits down a sandhole. Is that clear?”
“I’m not clear quite how you’d manage it,” drawled Naz.
“I don’t think you’re entitled to our bird-plane,” said Nilla.
“Entitled!” I squalled. “When you think you’re entitled to my home and my land and to pick my bloody plants to bloody pieces. Every moment I waste on you, two people out there may be in agony, or dead without benefit of Limbo.”
That sobered them. Nilla looked down. Naz said:
“Go on then. I’ll take charge. How about some ecstasy before you go?”
But I was running, Yay clacketing on my heels, for the plane in the grove of purple trees, so no doubt he didn’t catch my obscene answer.
* * *
—
Yay took forever at the controls before we lifted. I’d told him to check them out, remembering the wild Jang landing, and sure enough there was something wrong that he had to correct before we could get airborne.
We made it eventually, up into a black-marble sky
veined with faint cloud.
I didn’t know exactly where Kam had aimed for—it had been pot-luck, anywhere over the ridge, just so a few miles and rocks stood between their place and mine.
I know that I was thinking even then that they’d crashed, and it seemed so illogical for a plane to malfunction that the computer’s words came back and back to me. Maybe the desert had suddenly swelled up around them, huge and terrifying, a delayed phobia, robbing them of courage, sense, even of love. Maybe suicide, or panic, had caused Kam’s blue plane to dive into oblivion. But no, I couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t.
There were a good four hours of darkness left as we searched along the eastern ridges, scouring them with the plane’s underlights. Twice we went over the Cup, and I could look down past its rim into a vast, extinct volcanic crater; truly it was a cup, even inside, and once that bowl had brimmed with fire.
Near dawn we landed to recharge the friction batteries, which were crackling fretfully, then, after half an hour, went up again.
First pallid intimations of sun-arrival on the sky far below.
With daylight, it should be easy to spot…anything, not of the desert.
* * *
—
I saw the wreckage one hour after sunrise.
It lay along a sandy shelf, smoking dustily. Shadow and night had hidden it, for we’d passed this area before. From the positioning they’d been on their way back to the sandship, coming from the dunes beyond the eastern mountain slopes.
I shut my eyes and each of my senses when I saw. I felt no grief, no sickness, and no anger, only a great blank of nothing.
But I made Yay land our plane. I had to be certain they were dead, and then I had to get back and contact Limbo. Ego-death was better than absolute death, or so we all believed. Danor and Kam would be Danor and Kam no longer, but, rorls in the future, they’d come back from PD at least living.
I wasn’t relishing the thought of what I’d find—stray human parts, blood…The plane made a perfect touch-down on the rocks. I opened up and got out.
Then I heard the new noise, the thrub-thrub of motors in the sky I had just vacated.