by Tanith Lee
“Oh, well,” he said, and just waved his hand ever so vaguely, and smiled. It was a long-fingered artistic hand and a charming unexpected smile, the smile of a poet for an attractive girl, the bittersweet greeting of one who is a lover of life despite the tragic death that is slowly, inevitably, devouring him. I knew it pretty well, and not surprising.
He was in my body. The last one, the poet’s, slight and graceful build, aquilinity of feature, mane of loosely curling dark hair and large shadow-smudged blue opal eyes and all.
He hadn’t missed a trick. Not a farathooming one.
Even the gestures were mine.
Only the tan was different, designed to take the sun. Dying of consumption the poet might be, but he didn’t fancy sunburn on top of it.
“Well,” I said, “I’m waiting.”
“And very lovely you look doing it,” he said, gallantly. I must have looked, actually, like an electric circuit about to blow its valves out. I tried to calm down.
“Either you tell me,” said I, in a measured, steely voice, if a bit heat-melted at the edges, “why you chose to arrive like that, or you can turn your—your whatever-it-is around, and prance off back to BAA.”
“I can’t do that,” he said. “You know it.”
“Then explain your conduct. Quickly.”
He gave the BAA dragon a little tap and it gracefully knelt. He gracefully slid off and leaned there on its side, immaculately fragile. Oh, I knew that stance. He must have seen the pot boiling over again, because he held up one of those poet-swordfighters’s hands and said:
“It’s quite simple and perfectly mundane. You’ll be sick if I tell you.”
“You’ll be sicker if you don’t.”
“Very well, my lady of Jang. I saw the magic film, the film of the enchantress in the waste with her green garden. And I lost mind, soul, and heart. To you.”
“Crap,” I politely replied.
“Possibly. I told you you’d be nauseated. But you insisted on knowing my reasons, so it’s your own fault. There is something about your unique brand of boorish, arrogant stupidity that ties me up in a bow. So adventurous, so cynical, such a funny combination of valor and cowardice, idiocy and intelligence. Your dear little face being all lick-arse to the Committee while obscene signs shone from your eyes like neons. I knew at once I’d never fancy another female as long as I lived. So. I traveled to BAA in the legitimate last public sand-ship running, intrigued my way into the android-animal breeding-tank domes outside the city, persuaded some floop of an Older woman to let me try a quick dash over the sandy waste on a dragon, and never bothered to go back.”
“What about oxygen?” I said.
“They keep supplies on the out-city farms in case they need to leave the farm-domes in a hurry. Oxygen, anti-dehydration tablets, meal injections, the lot. I nicked what I required when the Older lady was resting, after our little—er—chat.”
“Fascinating,” I said. “You still haven’t mentioned my—your—body.”
“Obsessed with you as I was, what else could I do the moment I reached BAA, than order a replicate? It seemed also an excellent way to instant seduction. You’ve heard the theory, I suppose, that most of us only want to make love to ourselves? Here’s your chance, ooma. A never-to-be-repeated offer.”
He didn’t make a move, however, just went on looking at me.
I knew the theory fine. Another thing he’d stolen from me. Something in it, too, if my reactions were anything to go by. My heart was slamming about in my throat, and the other responses—those denied hormones pining so long—were leaping and prancing like things possessed. So, of course, I resented it. His cunning plot, my physical inebriation. And I didn’t trust him, he was too clever.
“You’re too clever,” I said. “I don’t trust you. I’m not sure I believe you, either.”
“My oxygen ran out last night,” he said. “This slightly asthmatic wheeze isn’t part of the act, it’s real. If I collapse at your feet, will you take me in?”
“Forget it,” I said. “One point you overlooked. I know the line; I should, I invented it. Get back on your animal and follow me. I suppose I’m stuck with you the way I’m stuck with all the rest of them.”
“Won’t you join me on the dragon?”
“No, thanks awfully.”
So he swung back up, and the beast rose, and they paddled behind me over the last stretch of sand, along the steel paths of the Garden, to the ship.
* * *
—
It wasn’t a pleasure to watch him. I think a small part of me was emerald with envy. After all, I’d hopped it from that excellently designed skin before I was really ready. Now, here he was, poetically swooning all over my veranda, with a reemerged Nilla scurrying to bring him food, drink, and cushions, and even Felain and Glis out and about, Glis getting medical machines to take his pulse and Felain cooing in his ears.
I stood at the other end of the veranda and sulked, glaring around with an air of rabid interest in the state of the climbing plants, the sky, the day. When Felain kissed his hand, I got off the veranda and went stalking toward Moddik’s workshop.
The dragon had nodded off enormously in the grass at the forest’s edge. It was a full android, with no need for food or water. Little curls of scented smoke came from its nostrils. Rather nice it was really, but, unfairly tarred with his brush, I hadn’t gone for it much before. What would the Gray-Eyeses (binnimasts) think of it? And the swan? That was better, I was cooling down a little.
I knocked on Moddik’s weird-shelter door. A strange clattering ensued. Then the door opened to reveal Moddik among a confused undergrowth of wires, steel frames, and transparent webbing. I began to believe what they’d said, he and Glis, about his knowing how to get anything from anything, as a machine does. In Moddik’s case, the rorls had obviously been put to good use. Everywhere actual machines were clicking and spatting, and Borss had been propped like a demoralized drunk in the corner.
“Is the arrival pleasing?” asked Moddik, tactfully blunt. “Is our young leader glad?”
“No, our young leader isn’t glad. The arrival’s Jang, and he’s had the abysmal gall to turn up here in my last male body—or a replicate.”
“Ah!” said Moddik. “I said he was enterprising, did I not? An acquaintance of yours, perhaps, from Four BEE?”
“You know, that never occurred to me. He says his name’s Esten, and I never met an Esten that I recall. He doesn’t behave like anyone I knew. Or even misbehave like them.”
“His manner may be assumed, carefully worked out beforehand in order to mislead. His name could also be false, since, out-dome, it hardly matters.”
I sat down to muse on this and hastily got up again with a yell. Moddik removed the six or seven pointed rods from the chair, and began to stuff them in an extraordinary apparatus that appeared to be growing into a gray jelly at the center of the room.
“I could ask Danor,” I said. “She was in my circle. But then, he may not have been in my circle.” As I said this, the pulse in my throat slammed me so hard I had to swallow to get rid of it. “He, oh, he said he got the body at BAA, via BEE. I suppose he reckoned that way, even if BEE got suspicious, they’d never catch up to him in time.”
“Bright lad,” said Moddik. “I shall look forward to meeting him. My prefab horror should be arriving, courtesy of the Committee, about noon,” he added. “I gave them directions, so it won’t land on the fire-root or anything. Then I’ll want that extra machine I mentioned from the ship—and, with any luck, by sunset tonight, the first water mixer will be serviceable. Not as beauteous as our friend out there, just ropy old steel nozzles and an ice-glass dome, but it’ll water the land, and that’s the idea, isn’t it?”
“What can I say?” I asked him. “I’m overwhelmed.”
“Then go and investigate your double and leave me in peace, you w
retch of a Jang girl,” roared Moddik, flapping sleeves and steel tubing and an unseen, nonexistent, ancient sorcerer’s white beard.
* * *
—
“Hallo, ooma, may I join in?” Danor asked, gliding into the saloon from which Yay and Jaska were clearing the messy remains of the Jang’s dawn meal. I was eating the home-grown sun-peaches for mine. I handed her the dish, with slight misgiving.
“They’re lovely, and they seem OK, but are you sure you want to? I may start an indiscriminate hair growth or something.”
“Might be pretty,” said Danor. “Long flamy gold-brown hair growing out, um, everywhere.”
We giggled secretively in the way of females who have shared many and varying experiences together. Having been in the same circle did count for something, despite my constant propaganda to the contrary.
“Oh, well, anyhow, that smashing nut Moddik was in here last night gobbling those pink things, so I reckon we might all just as well get boils together.”
We gnawed in silence awhile. Presently, pouring us fire-and-ice, I told her about the advent of Esten, what he had said, what Moddik had said, quite a lot about my own feelings on the subject.
Danor looked taken aback. I hadn’t, selfish and feeble-minded that I am, thought of the implications for her confonted by another me-as-male, a duplicate of the one with whom she had whiled away the hours without Kam. But, in point of fact, this scarcely seemed to trouble her, and she received my awkward mutterings calmly.
“No, ooma,” she said, “I was just considering what Moddik said, how it might be someone you know. I haven’t met him yet, but—do you remember what I told you about our circle when I got here?”
“Yes,” I said, and elegantly held up my hand (his gesture—my gesture—I’d caught it back off him). “Honestly, I did think of that. But, how would he ever dare?”
“Oh, I don’t think daring it would be the problem,” said Danor.
Hergal, female, with a male like my previous body, going off to BAA…I looked into my wine and didn’t say it. I truly didn’t know what I should say, or think. Or do.
Not, of course, that really I could do anything.
10
The unit passed, though “passed” is hardly the word for it.
It seemed to me the whole organized (?) structure of the community was going to pot. Or, at any rate, there were now only Yay and me out there hoeing, tying things up, earmarking things for extra water, and also—food task—pruning the vines and fruit trees and getting quick-growing fern to go south, south, dammit, and get off the tubers. Borss meanwhile had somehow become Moddik’s assistant in the workshop, which I could hardly resent (I told myself resentfully) since they were water-mixer making, a deed due to be for the general good.
However, other members of the general good…
Danor and Kam were over in the western area of the Garden. Moddik had said he thought he’d seen some gerkalli fruits, or something equally unlikely-sounding, coming up there. We’d gone to look, and sure enough gerkalli fruits they were, apparently. Kam had offered to stay and weed them out—desert weed is very nice, and can be directed into a grand display at the edges of the irrigation canals and thereby off the crops, since luckily it prefers hanging over water to strangling things. Kam and Danor also planned to extend one of the canals to join up with another, so I gave them Jaska and my blessing, thinking how worthwhile they were for helping and working so spontaneously. Back on my own with Yay, though, I had to keep pushing stupid “I-am-solitary-and-fed-up” thoughts from my mind. My cursing was a pleasure to hear. If any one had.
Naz lay on the veranda in permanent ecstasy, smiling at the green branches above. The swan lay in the green branches, smiling down at Naz. Esten’s dragon, which was going to be a drag, had been tethered at the edge of a clearing after it had torn up a young tree and bitten it in pieces with innocent cries of delight.
Nilla was making Her Own Garden. Moddik had suggested it, presumably to occupy her nonexistent mind. She was appropriating flowers and replanting them in Her Own Garden, where fortunately they took philosophical root. They were, without exception, pink flowers, like Nilla, with her magnolia skin and dusky strawberry hair, and she was making, for a centerpiece, a Jang abstract sculpture out of bits of Moddik’s leftover ice-glass. Which was all going to be, of course, astoundingly useful.
Moddik’s expected materials arrived at noon, as he’d said. He’d somehow persuaded the Q-R set-up to use the displacer to get them through quickly. Crates of atrocious, incomprehensible metal objects and plastic slabs therefore exploded into being in the clearing, and scared Esten’s dragon into ripping up another tree. Moddik checked them himself to save me the trouble.
The rest of the party were located thus: Glis and Felain in secret in the yellow cabin. Passing the door once, there seemed to be some sort of poetry and music recital going on rather than what one would have expected. Talsi, meanwhile, was being brazenly wanton out among the groves with Phy and Loxi. From their direction—roughly due south—climactic screams came with monotonous regularity.
As for Esten, he had been invited into Talsi’s grove and graciously declined; he had been invited into Glis and Felain’s cabin and had declined even more graciously. Nilla had tried to lure him into Her Own Garden, but he had sensibly said he felt exhausted and was going to sleep for ten hours. I’d tried to keep out of his way, mostly because I’d rather have plonked myself right next to him.
“Take the green cabin,” I said. “It’s the last one free, and you may have to share with Naz, if he ever comes around enough to get there.”
Before Esten vanished to slumber, however, I’d seen him in conversation with Moddik at the workshop door. Very earnest they both looked. Was Moddik explaining the inter-valvular pump circuits or something?
I stamped about in the greenery in a furious state of complete irrationality, and uncovered, during the course of the afternoon, four sets of Gray-Eyeses having it off, a snake making a hole and digging up one of the anti-earth-tremor stabilizers I’d so laboriously put down, and a new mauve animal swimming in an irrigation canal, which took one look at me and fled wailing into the undergrowth. Gradually many new types of this and that were wandering in. A sand-rabbit or two bounced through the fern, and dune-frogs croaked messages to each other through the desert nights. The insects were acquiring most derisann extra colors on their tinsel wings, and very groshing they looked. I passed from wonder to annoyance and back twenty times, and it was sunset, all at once, before I was ready.
* * *
—
Moddik showed us the water mixer at sunset, his eyes brilliantly alert as the shiny little wheels that spun in the mixer’s dome.
It wasn’t lovely to look at, as he’d predicted it wouldn’t be. Rather shorter than the original striding giant of whipped cream and mother-of-pearl, its semi-opaque ice-glass dome looked slightly indecent. Its squat body, mounted on tall yet somehow squat metal legs, had a freakish demoniac appearance. But when he touched the activator, the water misted from it like a sweet dream.
It went bumbling off purposefully, just as the original stalking colossus returned. They passed each other, stepping imperiously over the smaller trees, and looking like a beautiful maker and her ugly child who, differences unresolvable, refused to speak to each other.
I thanked Moddik lavishly. The Jang were impressed.
Nilla said, “How drumdiky it looks. Not decorative at all. Makes me positively tosky,” trying to inspire Moddik to maul her. She was wearing her most unembroidered see-through and had been picking the flowers again to adorn her hair. Moddik patted her on the head with a wicked look of senile indulgence, and Nilla fumed.
We were going off to sixth or seventh meal, but Moddik said he’d had a meal injection and wouldn’t bother.
“And I can easily get through the night on some stay-awake pills, my dear young leader,
and present you with eight or nine undecorative but useful water mixers come the dawn. Now I have the mold, it’s just a production line in here.”
“Stay-awake pills,” I said. “Meal injections.”
“You mustn’t think Jang have the monopoly on misuse of the body,” he reproved me. “Never fear, I shall snore the whole unit away tomorrow.”
“How disappointing for Nilla.”
The Jang were riotous in the saloon. Why not?
Danor and Kam, tired by honest toil, as I was, talked quietly with me. Naz floated above our heads on a float-cushion. Where was he getting so much ecstasy from? Moddik must have given it to him to keep him quiet. Loxi sidled over and invited me to the never-ending Talsi orgy, and I said something vile enough to send the entire menage hurrying off to their float-beds.
I went along the corridor with soil-burned feet and a spiteful mien.
Yellow cabin: Felain and Glis, no music now.
Apricot cabin: Loxiandphy, plus Talsi. It sounded like battle in there, what on earth—? Oh, graks to it.
Violet cabin: Danor and Kam. Controlling of foul thoughts. Sleep well, or whatever you’re up to, nice people.
Scarlet cabin: Nilla, who else? Pink Nilla on scarlet bed, pink hair spread on scarlet pillow. Nilla constructing a plan of action—how to get Moddik. Rotten dreams, ooma, and if you pick any more of those flowers I’ll bury you up to your neck in Gray-Eyeses’ natural fertilizer.
Green cabin: Esten stretched out for ten hours’ sleep.
Estenmyself.
The poet’s body, slender steel in a marble glove. Limber and strong as whipcord, didn’t I just know? Shadowy eyes, shut, lashes like black fringes of needles. White plains, dark valleys, hair line curling fern…Damn, damn, and damn.
Well? Why not go in? So you lost mind, soul, and heart to me, eh? Here I am. Show me.
Hergal, I said, almost aloud. Just the kind of mean, tantalizing game you’d play on me. Give me so much on a plate you know I’d never take it, then leave it all up to me to come crawling back.