by Tanith Lee
* * *
—
Not a very orderly meeting.
First of all, Loxi fingering the fringe on my dress and “Oh, ooma, I had one like this once, when I was a girl—in BAA—all flames it was…” Naz moaning about ecstasy, and Phy suddenly breaking down in floods of tears, his darkness-melancholia finally catching up, or just plain fear at our plight. Talsi, the non-Felain-fancying older woman, comforted him in a makerish—no, be precise—maternal way, very touching to behold. Danor and Kam sat close to each other, calm as could be, secure in their bond. I didn’t feel jealous anymore, but a sort of hollow place had come in my heart, and notices stood on the bare sand of it which read: “Vacant, and never now to be filled.”
“Very well,” I said, when things had settled a little, “we each know adequately who everyone is, and what our own and each other’s problems are likely to be, so maybe we don’t need to go into that right at this split. Our total numbers are eleven, not enormous, and our sexual leanings, despite our current bodies, seem fairly fluid, so I’m not sticking any labels on anyone. We’re going to have to cope with that as best we can, since we won’t have a chance of changing for the rest of our lives.” The slight murmuring that had started up fell off again at this doomful clarion call. “However,” I tritely said, “situations have a habit of altering unexpectedly. Who knows what tomorrow may bring?”
“Sand fleas?” volunteered Nilla.
“From here on,” I said pointedly, “we have to work together where possible, and try not to drive each other zaradann. For this purpose I suggest splitting up, and not living altogether in a bunch here on the ship. If Moddik can do what he says in the way of adapting—”
“I can do more than I say,” interposed Moddik flatly.
“Yah, yah,” said Naz. “Has yet to be seen, my soolka old ooma.”
“Good,” said Moddik. “Healthy opposition. I may clip you around the chops, young man, but don’t let that stop you. How many water mixers were you wanting?” His bright glance flashed at me like a couple of steel animals up on their hind legs, ready for havoc.
“About nine,” I said, to gauge his reaction. “But that’s for the valley. We’ll need more for the extra homes if we’re going to have them.”
Moddik nodded, got up, and went out.
I thought we’d offended him or something, but Glis smiled at me and said:
“He really is entirely brilliant. He’s going to wire up your third robot—Borss, is it?—for the blueprint to the watermixer outside. He’ll also use the monitor beam to request building materials. When they arrive, he’ll start reconstructing. You simply have to understand the principle of reprocessing, and then you can alter any substance eventually to fit your needs.”
“And Moddik does,” I said.
“Oh, yes.”
“It sounds impossible to me.”
“Oh, no. After all, most of the machines can do it, and once you grasp the fundamentals of the mechanical brain, which Moddik has, it’s easy.”
“Oh yes?”
“When we were at hypno-school, two rorls back,” put in Talsi, rocking the now smiling Phy upon her walnut satin bosom, “they sometimes gave awards for signs of genius. In those units it was even possible to make some sort of career for yourself if you wished to and were clever enough. Moddik won all the awards. Glis was a little boy when she was a child, and also very talented. I’m the stupid one. But I have a strong makerish streak, as you see, tied into my sex drive, so I shall be quite useful.” She beamed about, managing to catch Naz’s eye, Loxi’s eye, and even mine. Phy’s she didn’t need to catch.
Right then Moddik strode back in, and he’d done as Glis had said.
“I’m very glad you got through to the computer,” I said, “I wasn’t sure the link would still operate.” And with only this for introduction, I told them what had happened to Kam and Danor, after which Kam and Danor were madly questioned by hysterical Jang and briefly and sanely questioned by mad Moddik. Having established the facts to everyone’s horror, I thought I’d better add the final grim epilogue—or prologue? “Something has gradually become clear to me, one rather gruesome truth. Which is that, of all the three bird-planes that came out here, not one was without a malfunction. Moddik, Glis, and Talsi’s plane was out of control on landing and went up like a rocket just after. Danor and Kam’s plane got here OK, but on the second flight spilled oil into the batteries and nosedived. The Jang plane made a rotten touch-down so I got my robot Yay to check and correct it, and if I hadn’t I imagine my body would now be tastefully bedecking the mountains in various stages of incompleteness. This coincidence seems rather odd, to me. Even my sand-ship wasn’t of the best, and the provision dispenser exploded at the first possible opportunity.” There was silence thick as velvet in the saloon. You could hear the desert night wind furling round the ship. “How often do planes malfunction in the city? Ever? Perhaps once every rorl. Now, I’m not saying the Committee has done anything positive, but I do think that maybe they’ve let their robots get deliberately careless, forgotten to service the servicing machines, something like that. I don’t quite know how they managed, since they’re supposed to be permanently programmed to protect human life. Possibly they’ve got around it by recollecting that even when we die we don’t actually die, and what’s mere Ego-Death to an android? Our life spark goes on, they see to that. I don’t know. My theories are embryonic and the whole thing scares me. But I know this. By one means or another, subtly, unconsciously even, they are out to get us. They want the desert clear of us and our anti-city-system ideas. They fear that we’ll overthrow the harmonic rule of law and order, bring civil collapse, anarchy, and destruction in our wake—God knows how, but that’s the core of the matter. So we’d better watch out from here on. Every supply the city sends us we’ll machine-check, just in case someone’s omitted something and the next prefabricated building block goes into automatic combustion and blows us all to PD.” I paused, about long enough to take a breath. “I might add that food has been growing here on the northwest side, and the toxicity check has proved negative. For my eighth meal tonight I’m going to sample homegrown produce. If it’s pleasing, we can extend the venture. Self-sufficiency isn’t a bad thing to aim for, particularly placed as we are.”
Everybody stared at me. Even the shock of Q-R treachery had been slightly muffled by surprise at the food announcement.
“I’m not eating it,” said Nilla predictably. “I bet it’s absolutely drumdiky.”
“No one’s asking you to,” I said. “I’ve explained that I’ll do it.”
“Splendid heroic attitude,” said Moddik. “It’s probably delicious. But one point. The city syntho-food contains certain additives. Introduce additive-free substances into yourself and your body chemistry may change.”
“Yes, I realize that,” I said, “but I think I’ll acclimatize. If I don’t, no one else will try, that’s all.”
Felain and Loxi were looking at me worshipfully. Danor looked faintly troubled. Kam said:
“I’d like to volunteer to do it myself. You’re the founder of this enterprise. It shouldn’t fall to you.”
“It’s the very reason why it should,” I said.
I felt quite glad of their admiration or concern. Actually I had total faith in my ability to survive a few rosy fruits and a slice or so of tuber, or I’d never have done it. After all, it was city food to begin with, if unmixed and now intermingled with the properties of the wild. Somehow, having gone through so many traumas with the desert and survived, I’d come to feel there was nothing further to fear from it. An adversary to respect, to battle with, but not a mean one, not underhand. If it came at you, it came head-on, with a storm or an eruption or a tribe of marauding ski-feet. Not slyly, with a juicy fruit whose pips, germinating in some inner tract, would turn my skin green and scaly or my voice into a bark. Besides which, the negative tests showed
that any effects that did crop up would be minor and easily reversed.
You don’t get a coward like me being a heroine with a real dragon about. I hang my sword on the wall, and get under the float-bed, ooma.
8
What a night.
No one went to sleep. I think Nilla kept up to see if I’d go into a fit after my eighth meal of grown food. I could just visualize her standing interestedly over my spasming wracked body, saying: “How frantically drumdik, ooma-kasma. What a floopy thing.”
Actually, the only symptom the food produced in me was a desire for more. It was marvelous—fruits like nectar, tubers tart and succulent. The assembled company watched me eating, and followed me uneasily about afterward, patently expecting me to drop dead, despite the toxicity tests. Even Kam asked a couple of times if I was OK. The two-rorl older people were less bothered, and about Sister-blasting time, I caught Moddik in the saloon, nibbling a fruit.
“I thought we agreed,” I said.
“Couldn’t resist,” said Moddik. “We can compare dermatoses later. It’s not, my young friend, that I don’t entirely defer to your leadership.”
“I’m not the leader here,” I said, slightly unnerved.
“Are you not? Just wait till the next crisis and we shall all be there, bleating about your feet for directions.”
“Then I absolutely abdicate.”
“You won’t, you know. Like most loners,” said Moddik, “you carry the seeds of violent authority. Loners need to be bossy. They quickly learn it’s the only method they have of shoving people off their backs.”
This conversation stuck in my craw, mainly because it had the doleful ring of logic.
Moddik next informed me, as we gazed from the veranda at the nightly dual eruption in the south, that he’d noticed a few additional edible items growing here and there westward. Somehow he seemed to know what everything was for—sun-peaches, fat green roots, a nut tree which wouldn’t bear, he said, for about a vrek, and might need extra water, even vines from which we could make our own purely fruit-based wine.
“Moddik,” I said, “you’ve been here before, haven’t you? I mean, done something like this?”
He chuckled like a wicked little old man in a book, his young tan face crinkling like the dunes themselves with almost harmless vitriol.
“Not quite. I piddled around somewhat with a hydroponics garden in my youth.”
“You’re going to be a great asset, Moddik,” I said. “Thank goodness you came. Why ever did you?”
“And why did you?” said Moddik.
Not long after he went charging off and came charging triumphantly back with Borss, ghastly with exposed wires and plates unscrewed. Apparently we had the water-mixer blueprint. Presently everybody had to get chemical-fire lamps and follow our magician off to the west, where his plane had exploded, and here, under the whip of his instructions, we poked and probed about in the sand and smoke for bits of scorched metal, plasti-ware, and glacia-view.
“You’d be surprised what use I can put this to,” said he.
“I shouldn’t,” spat Nilla.
Moddik roared with laughter, and then he went over and lifted Nilla up in the air, looking strong as a robot and mad as mad. Nilla struggled faintly and seemed scared and pleased.
“So, little predominantly-female-who-isn’t, you think the nasty old Moddik gets his thrills that way, do you? I much prefer beating the weak and helpless to a pulp.”
Following this exchange, Nilla regarded him with a smoldering resentful interest.
Eventually he herded us back to the ship, and I was astonished to see that Yay and Jaska had put up a sort of shelter place for him over in a clearing near the grove of purple trees. I remembered I’d reset the robots to take orders only from me, but naturally, in Moddik’s clever case, this had meant nothing.
“My workshop,” said Moddik, and went inside with Borss of the trailing wires. Shortly, a frightening sound of bangs, thuds, and drilling burst upon the fragrant air.
* * *
—
The sun leaped up behind the eastern peaks as I sat alone on the veranda in my now somewhat stained and tattered finery. The Jang had finally retired in odd order—Felain and Glis, Loxiandphy both with smiling, voluptuous Talsi, Nilla petulantly alone (ha!), Naz euphorically with handfuls of ecstasy Moddik had indulgently conjured for him, after I’d said oh, all right, all right, to his never-ending lament. Danor and Kam, arm in arm, close as leaf on leaf in our Garden, closer than ever since their night on the mountain when death was closer still: close as the world itself. I, who rescued them, had approached the outskirts of their citadel, but no more. How could it be more?
It was a little like one of those ancient plays, which Moddik said were still put on in his youth, when all the characters leave the stage but one. Now for my soliloquy.
Not quite alone, however. The swan, adventurously, had flown up onto the ship’s roof and made a nest or something over the cooler vents, which would probably get blocked with its feathers. And from the strange shelter where Moddik still lurked came a pale busy humming.
The water mixer—did it know it had been blueprinted, was no longer unique of its kind?—arose on its tall legs and marched away, tender-pink nozzles spraying.
Sunlight stirred the avenues of the forest to an incredible scalding green. Beyond the Gardens, the desert painted rainbows.
A sort of happy sadness enveloped me. So beautiful, the dawn, and hope like the oxygen bright in the air, and I alone. Yes, the swan was noiseless on the roof, Moddik’s shelter humming grew faint as the whispering of the insects waking in the bushes.
Now I should close my eyes. And become the princess on the gate of her silver tower, waiting for her lover to ride, the somber warrior on his starry beast, across the glistening acres of the sand.
I had shut my eyes. Self-disgust made me open them.
And something was sparkling out there. Look down through the forest, beyond the slope of the Garden, way out to the dunes beneath the black upthrust backdrop of the eastern mountains. Something.
But what? No ships or planes would be taking this road, not for many a vrek, if ever. A rogue machine on the rampage? But from where?
Maybe there was a simple explanation: e.g., I was going nuts.
“Moddik!” I shouted. “Moddik! Hey! Help!”
He came out into the clearing, his hands full of bolts, rivets, and panes of ice-glass I didn’t know we possessed.
“Sorry to break up your genius activities, but would you step up here and tell me if I’m hallucinating?”
He stepped up and looked out. Then, from a bejeweled pouch in his tunic he produced a lens, and looked through that.
“Ah!” said Moddik. “Might have guessed. Can’t keep everyone in line, not even in the Fours.” He handed me the lens, and I, too, looked through its telescopic sight.
There wasn’t an excess of detail, the distance was still too great, but just enough to make me shiver, and glance around to be sure it wasn’t a silver tower gate I was mooning away on. The figure out there was a dark silhouette in the sun, but male he was, riding on a starry beast. A real starry beast—a dragon of diamonds with eyes of gold, and striding a good twelve feet from the ground on huge prismatic paws.
“I believe it’s an android animal from BAA,” said Moddik admiringly. “Lad must have stolen it. Enterprising young devil. I guessed that Q-R rubbish wouldn’t stop them coming out, not the really determined ones.”
My legs were shaking and I wasn’t quite certain why, or wouldn’t let myself be.
“Thanks, Moddik,” I said. “I’d better go and meet him.” Moddik grinned and I added lamely: “Before that dragon thing stamps down half the Garden.”
9
Even the shadows were green in the Garden. I’d felt tired before; I was wide awake now. Just because I was going out
to collect some dope of a Jang male off the dunes, probably tossing ecstasy down his throat, and howling. “Attlevey, ooma-kasma, it’s insumattly derisann, believe me, and I’m all up on the stars, you bet.”
Garden’s End was still about half a mile off, though the perimeter seemed to be widening itself a little, small dry grasses seeding, pastel-yellow thistle flowers clutching the sand. Coming from the shade, the sun strikes like a blow on the skull. I thought, collecting it for the three-thousandth time, I ought to get the machines to make me one of those old tribal sun-hat things, an oopsa or oosha or whichever. But I was brooding on down-to-earth practical details in order to stop my fantasies racing up my spine into my brain like an invading horde.
The beast was striding on toward the sand-ship, and me, only a few hundred yards off now over the dunes.
It was almost like a return of my agoraphobia, those few splits I was crossing the open sand. I was half scared to look up, even when the ink-black shadow of the gemstone animal fell thankfully around me. However, shading my eyes with an arm from the elbow of which amethyst trimmings still dripped, I raised my eyes, and stared aloft at the dragon’s rider.
“Nice weather,” he flippantly remarked. “Bit warm. But nice.”
A lot of things hit me at once. I wasn’t ready for any of them.
“Who are you?” I demanded, gritting my teeth with a sensation of white-hot lava crowding me from my flesh.
“My name’s Esten,” he said. “Derisann to meet you.”
“Damn you, you’ve got a farathooming bloody cheek. What are you up to, you bastard? What’s the grakking game, you—”
“Esten,” he supplied graciously, as if I’d forgotten, and was only filling in with insults to cover the lapse.
“Balls, Esten,” I said. “How’d you get it? Where’d you get it? Why’d you come here in it?”
“Oh, this? You mean the body, do you?”
“What else, you God-forgotten floop of a Jang thalldrap?”