by Tanith Lee
I started to feel peculiar the moment we flew over it, this great big, roiling, heaving lake of lava treacle. Bubbles popped and exploded in it, and jets of steam hissed and crackled. The Palace was obsidian, of course, and towered up in the middle of the chaos, obviously anchored, but still heaving slightly, along with all the rest. I suppose it was a stunning sight. The dark was coming on, deep blué, and the lake and the massive structure of the Palace glowed like flames. I still felt sick, though.
The bird-plane delivered me at the entrance, a terrace with steam pillars, and I went in. The floor was veined with gold inside, and presently it had other decorations as the pet threw up seventh meal in all directions.
I apologized, did some obligatory paying, and signaled another bird-plane to rescue us.
As we drifted over Four BOO I thought: They can keep their palaces. We’ll sleep in a park tonight. Firm ground, and the weather’s always perfect, of course, in a dome. And lots of Jang. I’ll say I’ve come here to do some contemplating.
So we went and bought an utterly insumatt cube of glass and steel and gold, shot through with wonderful color, containing about fifty possible infinities. It would be worth contemplating this thing, even if nothing else did turn up. Then, in the bird-plane, full of crazy hopes and remembering again with intense joy my half child waiting in Four BEE, the pet and I and the beastly boo floated down in the starlight on a soft park lawn.
I skimmed along, having turned the boo’s little evening light on, and chose a grove of diamante trees. I got arranged, had a meal injection, inspected my hair and clothes and everything else in the long mirror in the boo, and then half reclined, graceful and languorous, with the cube anchored to a tree trunk just the right distance away. And I really got lost in it, even with all my crazy hopes and so on. I truly didn’t hear their voices till they’d been at it for quite a while.
They were both male, both pretty groshing, one white-haired and one dark-haired.
“I’m Sarl,” said the dark one promptly, as soon as I’d looked. “This is Lorun.”
“How derisann,” I murmured. The pet snarled, and I tried to land it one surreptitiously.
“Lonely, are you?” asked Sarl. He leered at me. Well, it wasn’t going to be him, for a start.
“Oh, I’m not lonely,” I said, “just rather hungry. I’ve been so busy contemplating, you know, I’d forgotten about meals. Is there anywhere …?”
“Come with me,” said Sarl.
“No,” I said, “I want to go on contemplating. I’m going to have ecstasy soon. Could you bring me something, I wonder?” And Sarl, the thalldrap, went marching off to do just that. I looked at my spoils. Mmm.
“And you’re Lorun.” I smiled.
“That’s right,” Lorun said. He didn’t even sarcastically congratulate me on my remarkable memory.
“This is my pet. I’m afraid it might bite you.”
“Oh, I’m used to animals,” said Lorun. He came up and sat down, and soon there was the pet rolling on its back, with its six mad paws in the air, going zaradann as he tickled its tummy. Well, you couldn’t blame the pet. Really, the male had the most arresting body. He was sort of slight but muscular, with long powerful legs and groshing, artistic hands. His hair was quite short, only to his shoulders, and he didn’t have a beard or mustache, just these somehow frightfully endearing dark eyebrows and lashes, which were crazily derisann against his ice-paleness. Good taste.
“I’m sure you are lonely,” he eventually said, when he’d practically driven the pet and me out of our minds.
“Well, yes,” I conceded, “it’s possible.”
“Stranger to Four BOO, perhaps?”
“Four BEE.” I must confess I wasn’t even thinking about the child at that particular moment.
“Ah then, as a native, you must let me take you under my wing.”
“What a good idea. I’m sure it would be a nice wing to be under.”
“How charming you are,” said Lorun. “But what about your ecstasy?”
“It can wait,” I decided.
But he decided it couldn’t. We would have ecstasy together. Just then he spotted Sarl marching back to us across the lawns and terraces, bearing food and wine.
“Come on,” said Lorun, “or did you particularly want to eat now? We can wait if you like.”
I didn’t like, and said no. So we scampered off through the trees like naughty children at hypno-school, our boos dragging along the pet and the contemplation cube, with their lights out.
We had ecstasy in a robot-controlled bird-plane, but Lorun kept messing around with the gears and buttons, and it was like being with Hergal in one of his better moments.
In the middle of the most ghastly nosedive, that any other time would have frightened all the breath out of me. Lorun inquired whether I would care to get married for two or three units.
Even the pet didn’t make a fuss about it. I think it was somehow under the impression that it had married him too.
8
Well, I never thought I was cut out for idylls, but apparently I was. We really lived, breathed, ate, slept each other. Lorun also had a present maker who was absent then in Four BAA. Their home was a huge crowd of shut-in domes and spires under a palely golden lake, near the center of the city. It was a pretty select area, with not many other homes down there, under the fawn silk waters. Weird water plants waved around the windows, as we had love and had love and had more love.
And it was all such fun, apart from being so erotically satisfying. We romped and played about with the awful pet, and Lorun really didn’t seem to mind it tearing up the creeper curtains and ripping at the air lock doors. We went swimming and bubble-riding under-lake, visited the under-lake restaurants and playgrounds—also very select and very groshing too—talked and laughed and were crazy together. I really thought I was on to something, but I didn’t bring up the subject of the child just yet. Somehow there seemed more to this relationship than just a prospective other-self maker hunt. And then, when the three days were up, Lorun suggested we apply for an extension to the marriage.
We got duly extended and had love to celebrate, nice but not original, and then somebody signaled Lorun and said would he care to help in some Jang sabotage.
“Want to join in?” he inquired.
“Don’t you want me to, ooma?”
Lorun proved conclusively that he did, so we went together.
I hadn’t sabotaged a thing for vreks and vreks, and felt a bit rusty and tosky through the euphoria of being with Lorun. We met the rest of his circle, four weird females with tendrilous hair and one with a single whorled horn growing from her left temple, Sarl and another male. Sarl snarled at me.
“Er, attlevey,” I said, feeling decidedly alien. I said circles are getting terribly cliquey and this was a fine example.
“Attlevey,” they all droned, looking at me as if I’d just unexpectedly returned up the vacuum drift or something.
“You’re Lorun’s new marriage, are you?” horny-puss asked nastily. I could just tell her finger-long nails were more than mere Jang decoration.
“Oh, I thought you were still the last one,” said another female, with all-blue eyes and eight-fingered hands—even more nail danger. Well, honestly.
“Sorry,” I said sweetly, “I’m the new one with the quick temper and the uncontrollable homicidal tendencies.”
“Oh really!” they flounced, but still looked a little worried.
Lorun seemed oblivious to it all, Hergal-like, though none of the predominantly female females in my circle—like Thinta and me—were quite as atrocious as this lot.
“Come on then,” Sarl said, dismissing me as beneath his contempt. “Let’s not muck around.”
So we didn’t, but lolluped out of this floating park where we’d met, if you could call it that. We went by a succession of float-bridges and moving streets, terribly complicated, meant to be part of the excitement or something. I just got toskier and toskier, and eventually sai
d they’d have to wait for me a minute. I went out and stole three chains of mother-of-pearl and amber, which I nonchalantly swung around my hips. I felt a bit better then but the circle grumbled about the delay, not realizing about my Neurotic Needs, which was just as well.
Lorun stopped it by just gazing at them and saying, ever so silkily and softly: “Shut up, you double-eyed thalldraps.”
I felt gratified or something, and then a bit annoyed too, I couldn’t quite work out why. Anyway, not long after that we actually had to walk, and we were getting near the outposts of Four BOO. The lookouts here have names as well as alphas. The one we were after was called Dulsa D.
“Here we are!” they announced when we arrived on this flat rock platform at the bottom of millions of flights of non-moving steps. The lookout was a little bluish cube, set near one of the dome locks. We strode up to the ice-glass doors and pushed the call button. I began to feel really nervous, then realized how much I was enjoying being nervous, after which I went deadly calm and stopped enjoying it, which was a shame. Pink lights flashed in Dulsa D. A voice asked us what we wanted.
“Emergency!” we shrilled in panic-stricken voices. Honestly, I thought, you’d think if the Committee worried about these little disasters, they’d program their lookout robots to realize there can never be an emergency, that it’s only a lot of stupid Jang trying to get in and mess things up. I suppose that’s the answer. The Committee isn’t worried. How depressing not to be able to worry someone, anyone, no matter how hard you try.
Naturally, once our screams of terror registered inside, the pink lights changed to red, the usual succession of ten doors opened and shut behind us, and we charged in yelling. Sometimes there are two robots, sometimes only one. This time there were four. Needless to say, we thrilled to this prospect of action.
Lorun and Sarl and the other male grabbed the nearest one and crashed it into the one behind, then sat on the struggling metallic mass and pulled out their dismantling plugs. Three females rushed another and floored it with swinging ropes of crystallize beads, while horny-puss and I suddenly found ourselves comrades in arms as we jumped the last. I found its dismantling plug while she bashed it in the electricity reflex circuit with her horn.
Glowingly we congratulated each other and headed for the controls. But really, I thought, there’s not much you can do except create a very minor shudder in the barrier beams, which allows a bit of real weather or earthquake or something in for about two splits. Still, we’d blind ourselves to that and convince ourselves we were being daring and terrible, upsetting the system. We looked at the scanners and there were these three ooma mountains all starting to erupt at once, with lava pouring toward us.
“Now!” Lorun yelled, and everybody smashed around among the buttons and dials with practiced paws.
And the next thing we knew we were on the floor. Four BOO had given a great heave or something. Already the waves would be knitting themselves together again all around, but some of that lava was bound to get through. And then something struck me. This wasn’t rain, or ash, or earth-shudder that city buildings laugh at. This was painful, deadly, red-hot magma. In Four BEE the volcanoes are fewer and less active. I don’t think we could have got lava into BEE if we tried. But to try, to arrange things so lava would be the main course on the menu … I felt horrible, cold and sick all of a sudden.
“People will be burned,” I said to Lorun, with a surprising total comprehension of what was happening that I could see was beyond the others.
“So?” Lorun said. “It’s an Event. We’ve made something happen. “We’ve come here before, but never had much luck with the lava. This is groshing, my ooma. Enjoy it.”
“Oh, Lorun,” I whispered. And then I noticed something no one else saw: a little green light coming on and off in the wall. I went and looked at it, and it was neatly engraved with the words Emergency wave shield now operating. The Committee! I loved the Committee! The wise, wonderful, groshing Committee! They knew about Jang sabotage, but they protected the city. All right, let the Jang open up the dome but, with dangerous lava about, have an immediate response mechanism to shield the dome while the waves rescued themselves, and a mechanism you couldn’t get at, either.
Our sabotage had been thwarted, and I felt so happy.
I flung my arms around Lorun and kissed him. He looked pleased. He looked less pleased when we ran off afterward and found the city perfect and untouched. The others turned positively filthy. They somehow seemed to think I was responsible for their failure, and if wishing was doing, I suppose I was.
9
After the lava business, I should have been firm with myself over Lorun. But I wasn’t. All right, I reasoned, there was something—one item—about him I didn’t like, but I was still insumattly zaradann over him. I just couldn’t say “I’m off now. Get us annulled.” I informed myself that I would hold out until the end of our marriage extension, which was in about ten units, and decide then about the maker idea.
Then Lorun said would I care to go to Four BAA in his private bird-plane, and that settled it. Well, I wanted to see Four BAA, for one thing.
“My maker,” Lorun said, casual, “is something to do with the breeding farms. We can go and have a look around one, if you like.”
The bird-plane was super luxurious and robot-flown. We had love and played rather special Upper-Ear, which made you feel gentle and soothed as well as crazy with delight, and ate sugar plums on gold-ice, and were generally debauched.
The pet came too, and was just as debauched as we were. It gobbled up sugar plums and rubbed against Lorun with positively nauseating love luridly illuminating its wicked orange eyes.
The bird-plane went fast and we reached Four BAA inside a day, just before desert dawn and sunset in the dome. I was sorry to miss another real dawn, but I’d noted sadly that the window spaces in the plane were tastefully opaqued with a gold brocade effect.
We went to Lorun’s maker’s residence. The maker looked at us vaguely and asked which of us was her child. Apparently Lorun had been in a different body the last time they met. Lorun promptly said it was me, thereby causing tornadoes of embarrassment. We got sorted out eventually and the maker went away with a gorgeous older male with dark red hair, leaving us to our own devices.
We janged around the home, then went out to eat on a blue lake under the stars on a canopied golden raft, attended by jeweled quasi-robot girls with long hair made of non-wet blue water. BAA is the absolute center of all things rich and strange. Dragons with sapphire scales blew fountains out of the lake all around us. A pearl-encrusted serpent came up on the raft to peer at us and I had to grab the pet quickly, in case it thought this was another robot animal like the snake I bought for Hergal. Actually the pet got a bit tosky and went burrowing into Lorun’s chest, honking.
After eighth meal, we rode through a tunnel of specially grouped stars, very high up, on the back of a wonderful bird with burning silver plumage and a ruby beak; it sang strange love songs in a light, sweet, melancholy voice, the most beautiful and passionately sorrowing I’d ever heard. Practically weeping, Lorun and I lay in each other’s arms among the red cushions, and soon he said, “Marry me for vrek after the extension ends, or two vreks, you derisann angel of scarlet light.” I think the poetry was contagious, but anyway, I was lost.
“Oh yes,” I breathed. “Ooma, ooma, oh yes.”
But the extension wasn’t up yet.
10
We went out to this android animal breeding farm in Lorun’s plane.
It sits there, way off from the city, though you can still see the enormous glitter of the dome sides stretching up and up till they’re out of sight in the distance.
The farm, the first of seven, only one of which makes actual Q-Rs, is also under a dome, but a small dome with a mere pebble of a sun and sequins of stars, and they’re just around to get the animals used to it all. Apparently Lorun’s maker is one of the button-popping, dial-turning brigade, but even so you’re expecte
d to fraternize with the growing animals, and it seemed really groshing, interesting, worthwhile work. I had this sudden vision in which my future gelled, more or less permanently married to Lorun, our child at hypno-school, and me working at the farm with his maker, being ever so companionable and all that. It got to me so much that I turned to him and said:
“Lorun, there was an ulterior motive in my coming to Four BOO. I wanted to find …” and then I hesitated, I don’t know why, although perhaps I really do know. I felt I just couldn’t ask about the child just yet.
“Yes?” he prompted.
“No,” I murmured, “after this. I’ll tell you later.”
He looked a bit irked, but let it pass.
We left the plane and went in and out of pagodas and towers and palaces, stopped by lakes and rode up to cloud masses where birds of fire and perfume were being trained to fly and sing. And after a bit I started to feel depressed out of my mind. I tried to fight it and got high-voiced and over merry, but it didn’t do any good. I think it was the pet’s fault, really. It went silent and started to shiver.
“I think the animals here scare it,” I said to Lorun, to start with. I mean they were all puffing out flame and scent and waterspouts and goodness knows what, and half of them were phosphorescent or watery, or disappeared at every third step and reappeared at the fourth, or something. And then I began to see that this wasn’t what got the pet down. The pet was an animal too, but a real animal, a born animal, primitively conceived and carried, hatched out of a warm, sat-on-by-a-furry-bottom egg, in the desert. These animals were made of the same molecules, by similar primaries and ovaries, but with the Q-Rs’ electrically motivated life-spark, and the same subservience to mankind. They’re for decoration. They are to be pretty and mythical. And suddenly I recalled my ooma dragon in the Jade Tower, and a pain burst in my heart like a great flower. How often had I sat in its harmless mouth, full of pine scent and green fire, that should have been able to champ me into mash? I knew an intense longing to cry but couldn’t, and held the pet to my face so that we could share our twin inhibited misery.