by Tanith Lee
I left the fur room and went to the pool. I injected myself with oxygen and swam for a long while among the waving jungle of exotic weeds at the bottom. I was a lost princess of an ancient line, seeking a monster in the turquoise depths of some forbidden sea.
Crash! That thalldrap, Kley, had signaled. The three-dimensional image of Kley and some tosky Jang party he was at careered all over the pool.
“Switch on, ooma,” Kley called.
“I’m tired,” I said. “Go away. Go away.”
But they wouldn’t go. They were in ecstasy, but with energy pills to make them energetic at the same time. Oh, it was ghastly.
I got out of my ruined, forbidden-sea pool, and the dancing image followed me through our neat gardens, bashing into abstract statues and whatnot, and getting tangled up in the five-dimensional pillars. I found the recluse switch, and the party was gone, exploded out of its nonexistence back to its real existence somewhere or other.
I saw the pet bounding across the gardens, a white blur through the silk-of-aluminum grasses.
I wanted sleep.
I dreamed all night, unprogrammed dreams in which a nebulous, dark being chased me through fires and waters and finally bit me, while overhead the perfect ornamental stars under Four BEE’s invisible, domed wave-roof glittered and gleamed.
I remember that time at the Prism Playgrounds I had my dreams analyzed, when Hergal and I lost each other. Not that I understood a word of what the robot told me as I stared into its big electric eyes. I really think I was too busy cursing Hergal to concentrate properly.
In my sleep, I heard an awful crash. I woke up. A flash was blazing over the city. Hergal again. We weren’t far from the Zeefahr, and I nearly always heard the impact. I transparalyzed a wall and watched the flame streamers licking the sky.
What an unimaginative pest Hergal was.
But the flash was clearer now, and it wasn’t Hergal.
This time it was Thinta.
How utterly drumdik.
6
“Hallo, Danor,” I said.
He looked pleased. I’d recognized his new body immediately. I’d seen the flash as I gave myself a meal injection. (I can hardly ever face anything more solid first thing in the morning.) He’s always so slim and dashing though, whether male or female, that you couldn’t miss him really. He was all long hair and drooping mustache, totally the rage just now, and both absolutely jet black with a sort of sapphire sheen to them, midnight blue eyes, and no wings. Antennae, though.
“Like me?” He turned slowly around, and I admired him. He did look rather effective and was wearing a kind of metallic second skin, with the sort of boots I’d programmed in my dream of the cursed lover.
“Derisann,” I said.
It was quite late morning. When I sleep, I sleep on and on, often until Four BEE gets itself dark again and turns on the starlight. Otherwise I knock back my stay-awake pills with everybody else.
“Come and eat,” Danor invited. He adored food.
“Couldn’t,” I said.
“Oh. The Dimension Palace, then. Hatta said there’s a new labyrinth on Super-Seven.”
He was so enthusiastic, it seemed a pity to put out the flame, so we trailed along to the Palace.
The Committee, which is continuously bringing out reports on everyone and thing in Four BEE, states that the D.P. provides an “essential outlet for negative motivational reflexes.” Anyway, that’s what it says on the flashes.
The dimensions are, of course, interesting; air can be solid or different colors, or everything be inverted so that, for instance, you look at your nose in a mirror and have a fit because it’s growing inward instead of out and you can only see with your eyes shut.
All told, the Dimension Palace really shakes you up. It’s very popular. I suppose you don’t get many shocks in Four BEE normally, except when an automatic door opens upward instead of down, or something.
Super-Seven was a total nightmare and I didn’t last long. I suddenly found myself over in one place, looking back at myself in another, or rather at my body from the hips downward because I’d split in two. It was pretty ghastly. I mean you obviously haven’t really split in two or anything. It’s just that the law in this particular piece of dimension makes it look as if you had. I could even still experience what my legs and feet felt like, and when I put my hands down to them I could touch my thighs. When I did that I saw my hands appear by my thighs, which was reasonable, but as my thighs were on the other side of the room, it looked a bit drumdik. Then I found I’d split again. I was peering back at my faraway hips and legs and feet, and, a little nearer, my willowy waist and exotic bust and shoulders, all with coils of scarlet hair lying neatly about them, but chopped off at neck level. I was just a head presumably. Sweat leaped out all over me, and I could feel it all over me, thank goodness. What would happen if I moved again? I risked it. Farathoom! I was staring at my upper body now, and a bit farther off my poor disorientated head, and I was looking, actually, out of my feet.
At that my yells took on form and flapped all over the place; the panic button went off on my belt, and seconds later hordes of robots, oblivious of the ghastliness all around, hurried me back to sanity.
7
Danor and I floated drowsily in our adjacent baths of warm liquid air, still trembling from horror. Once the delicious relief wore off, I knew I was going to feel, as I always did, how futile that kind of nonconstructive terror is. But just now, completely attached to myself, my hair unfurling like a fabled red anemone, I was quite glad I’d come. Danor came drifting to the dividing wall and pulled himself over into my bath. We plunged around and quite soon began kissing each other, and then Danor hauled us on to one of the air cushions.
“Let’s have love,” he suggested, making the proposition quite appealing.
“You know that’s only for Older People,” I said. “It’s absolutely non-Jang not to marry first.”
Danor rolled on to his back and stared at the abstract picture mist on the ceiling.
“Then let’s get married,” he said, “for mid-vrek.”
Mid-vrek is forty units and that’s a long time, but Danor looked hopeful and somewhat tempting, so I agreed.
We took his bubble up Purple Waterway and dashed through corridors of mauve liquid, with Danor thumping the controls wildly. He seemed in an awful hurry.
The Ivory Dome is a good place to marry. The quasi-robots tend to keep their opinions to themselves, and not remind you all the time that on the last six marriages they did people who were more grateful and enthusiastic about paying, before rushing off and having love. In the creamy foyer we bought each other rings, five each for the left hand, and I just didn’t have the heart to try to steal mine, with Danor so gallantly bawling himself hoarse in the pay-booth.
We coughed along the moving spiral to a free hall, and got into all the floating white stuff you have to wear. The quasi-robot in a black robe and sparkling headdress took our vows of loyalty to each other for mid-vrek with a superb show of interest.
“I promise to have love with you and no other for the period aforesaid, unless I seek annulment, which may be granted on alternate units throughout the marriage, and which must be paid for.”
Four BEE’s power station banks do rather well out of this, actually, because long-term liaisons nearly always fade away quicker than the participants have reckoned. Four BEE covers itself on short-term alliances, too: if you only marry for a unit or an afternoon, which naturally falls short of the annulment period, you have to pay both before and after your stay together.
Danor and I exchanged the ten rings without dropping any. (Hergal usually dropped every single one and they made a terrible row, crashing and rolling all over that marble.) Then, together with our robot, we paid our “thank yous,” after which Danor dragged me out of Ivory Dome and into the bubble again, and we splash-dashed away to a floater.
The floaters, which drift gently in the sky and are made of plactic-reinforced cloud m
ass, are favorites with newlyweds. I’d been in them quite often, but their niceness seldom palls.
Danor pushed me gently but firmly on to a large, soft but adjustable bed of gold and purple storm-drift, and ran a melter over my clothing and his.
“I find your body most attractive,” he breathed. ‘It’s one of the best you’ve ever designed.”
Flattered, I smoldered under his caresses, and was rather shocked when he suddenly drew away and sat up.
“What’s wrong, Danor?”
Danor looked sad.
“It’s no use,” he said. “I thought, with you, it might be, but it isn’t.”
We tried again, however, in various positions, and it began to get dark, and we were tired of it all by then. We rested and drank love-potions, and swallowed ecstasy and energy pills, and finally lay side by side, panting with unproductive fatigue.
“If only,” Danor murmured, “we could have had love at the Dimension Palace, I know it would have been all right. It’s all this delay. It’s always the delay.” He peered at me soulfully. “I haven’t had love now, successfully, for ten vreks.”
I was horrified. Poor Danor.
“Surely,” I said, hiding my disappointment rather well, I thought, “it’s just that you’re predominantly female, the same as I am. Possibly more so. When I was male last and Kley was female, everything went splendidly. But you’ve been male for ages. I expect you need a change.”
“Unfortunately,” Danor said, “it’s no use then, either. Just easier to pretend it is, when I’m a girl.”
I tried to think of some bright encouraging sentence, but none came.
Danor went to a cloud wall and turned on the pressure so that a large oval window appeared. He looked at twilit Four BEE, glittering underneath.
“Goodbye,” he said. And he jumped out and fell hundreds of feet into the city. It stunned me. He looked as though he meant it, even though it was a pointless act when they’d only shove him in a new body ten splits after he hit the ground. A most weird feeling went over me, like when you meet the dragon in a dream—only not like that because that’s enjoyable terror and this wasn’t—and I struggled and tried not to let the feeling fill me up. And suddenly I recollected we’d married for entire mid-vrek, and now I’d have to pay for the annulment tomorrow. So a warm reassuring anger came instead. Annulment is something you can’t steal, and you can’t marry anyone else, even for half an hour, until you’ve bought it.
I fumed and fussed around the floater all night; I punched at those silly clouds and shouted at them when they served up this groshing meal I didn’t want.
I faced the dawn disheveled, not wanting to stay up there and hating the thought of-all that thanking I was going to have to do at Ivory Dome, with the quasi-robot probably looking disapproving that we’d lasted such a ridiculously short time.
“Attlevey, ooma,” said a voice, and I saw the signal light was on, and there in the room with me was the three-dimensional image of this gorgeous girl, with a body very like mine, except for jet black hair with a sapphire sheen to it.
“It’s me, Danor,” she said.
“Groshing,” I said. And a little cold bead rattled in my mind, but I was fed up to my back pearly teeth, wasn’t I? And I soon forgot it.
“I thought you’d like to know,” Danor said calmly, “that I’m going up to Ivory Dome now, to pay for the annulment.”
“Thanks,” I barked, and flicked the recluse switch.
8
I wandered around Four BEE all day, then felt a bit odd and realized that I hadn’t eaten again, and had a meal injection.
I fet Thinta near the Robotics Museum. She actually likes it in there. I didn’t know her at first in her new body, but she was just the same in fact, underneath the soft gray fur, and her eyes, although without any whites now, were the usual clear green.
“It was the Dream Rooms,” Thinta explained as we drank snow-in-gold at an underwater restaurant. “I always dream I’m some sort of cat thing. I wanted them to make me a cat’s body, but they refused. The fur’s only a compromise, really.” She started to grumble about the Committee and the way they hadn’t let her have a built-in purring system, and I got away as soon as I could.
I honestly wanted to cut every single friend out of my circle, I was suddenly feeling so droad and alien with all of them, but in the end I officially cut myself out, which was easier and then I sat on the steps of Jade Tower under the dragon roars and sprays, and cried.
I mean, it’s polite to cry when you’re cut out of anyone’s circle even if it’s your own. But it went on and on. I couldn’t stop.
I think I cried all night.
PART TWO
1
I got home about morning, and found my makers were in the act of splitting up.
“Home is yours,” they said kindly, “we’ve made our own arrangements.” Older People can do that—just pack up and leave each other and go off with someone else whenever they like. They were both still male.
Robots were moving out their stuff. It felt odd, seeing them go, just like that, not that we’d ever been close or anything. You never are with makers, even if they do stay in the same place with you after hypno-school is finished.
“Don’t worry about the home-payments to the Committee every third vrek,” they added. “We know how you hate paying, so we’ve made provision to pay for you, alternately. It seems only right, after so long.”
I was almost glad when they’d finally gone. I felt so peculiar about it all.
And home sort of … echoed. I don’t know.
Hatta signaled me ages afterward, or perhaps not so long, really, it just seemed ages. His voice invaded my privacy, but without any image—probably just as well, knowing Hatta.
“Attlevey, Hatta,” I sighed.
“What’s all this,” Hatta demanded, “about cutting yourself out of your own circle? You can’t. It’s not—well—it’s not ethical.”
“Oh,” I said.
“No,” said Hatta. “Are you feeling low because of the annulment with Danor?”
“No,” I said; I wasn’t sure.
“You need cheering up,” Hatta told me. “I’ll take you for a meal.”
“No. Thank you.”
“Well, the Adventure Palace, then? There’s a new Upper-Ear symphony in Fourth Sector. Fire-riding?”
“Really, Hatta. I honestly can’t—”
“Look, ooma, I’m serious,” said Hatta seriously. I cursed him, but rather wearily. “I’d like so much to marry you. Just for the afternoon.”
“Let’s see you,” I said coldly.
“Well, er,” said Hatta.
“Your image,” I said. “Now.”
“There’s something wrong with the control. I can’t seem to get an image through to you—”
“Nothing ever goes wrong with the control,” I said. Well, it doesn’t. Hatta muttered. And then, there he was.
“Oh Hatta!” I shouted. “You utter thalldrap! You floop! Oh go away!”
He was huge, bluish, shiny, limpy, but it was the two heads that really got me down.
“But ooma—”
“No. Nonononono! If you want me so much, get yourself a reasonable body.” He hung around in midair, undecided, and so drumdik I nearly went out of my mind. I threw an abstract stone thing, with moving colors in it, at him, and thrust down the nearest recluse switch.
I felt better, though, after throwing something at Hatta. More my bad-tempered self, I suppose. The pet came crashing in from the gardens and bit me, and I chased it all ever the place, trying to land it one with a big furry cushion, and with machines clucking and clicking disapprovingly around us, as they tried to get on with the cleaning. It was quite merry.
Eventually the pet curled up warily on a suspended flying floor, just out of my reach, and went to sleep, keeping one orange eye open and one fang delicately protruding, just to remind me I suppose.
I ate a meal and began to think.
I was tired
of being Jang.
2
I took my bubble down Peridot Waterway, with the pet sitting on a passenger couch, staring at me. I’d tried to leave it behind, but hadn’t got the bubble side closed in time. It had developed a new game in between starings, trying to swat my bee as it zoomed overhead, always threatening to come down. I noticed that the bee seemed to keep aloft much better with six white paws and a mouthful of teeth careering at it.
I tied up a little way down from the Zeefahr and took a moving street to Second Sector’s Committee Hall. The pet bit legs on the street, and things got a trifle noisy, though the Older People seemed to forgive me as I was Jang. Ironical!
We tumbled off, me, my bee, and the pet, and went into the Hall, which is black and imposing. They make it look as antisocial as possible to keep everyone out, but it doesn’t seem to work. The place was packed.
I sat down in a free space in one of the gently revolving circles of chairs and pressed the Attention Required light. Everyone seemed to be complaining today. Complaints about picture-vision programs not being erotic enough, and old-established aphrodisiacs and laxatives that didn’t seem to work any more. Moans about fading silk-grass in the parks, falling leaves being heavier than last vrek, the starlight being late or dim or something over First Sector last night. People saying they were paying too often for their homes, and thank-you-hysterics who said they weren’t paying often enough.
A robot arrived in front of me.
“Request?”
“Age and status change,” I said.
There was a sort of hush, and I could feel eyes peering at me and tiny minds thinking: “Whoopee! A freak!”
“Registered,” snapped the robot, then couldn’t resist adding: “One-A, First-Class Unusual. Do you have medical grounds for this?”
“No.”
“Do you have any grounds at all?”
“I think so,” I said. “You probably wouldn’t.”