Don’t Bite the Sun, Tanith Lee [warren buffett book recommendations .txt] 📗

winds and the sand chipping me, the rain eroding me, the hot sun drying me up. Later, I was a lake, blue and rippling, miles of me, and it’s wonderful to be so long and wide, and aware of every inch and eddy of yourself. I kept giving gentle little twitches, flinching the sun off my skin, encouraging my water plants to grow.

I came to and was surprised at first to find I had two arms and legs and hair, and all the boring rest of it. I had this impulse, which apparently is quite common after S.D., to dash off to Limbo and say “I want a long, blue, rippling body.” But they sidetracked me. They came buzzing along and gave me a meal injection, and encouraged me to write poetry on a machine about my experiences.

Thinta came to meet me—I have this feeling they suggested she should and of course, Thinta, being loyal and painfully duty-bound, came haring over in her safe pink bird-plane. Oh, yes, she was being very safe today. You’d never think she crashed on the Zeefahr too, not so long ago, just like habit-ridden Hergal.

“Let’s make water dresses,” twittered Thinta.

We went and got the stuff and the instructions, and wandered for ages along galleries of clacking light-crochet machines, steel-knitters, and picture wool on which you can paint with electric rays, landscapes and things to bewilder yourself and your friends with. I wanted to see what Thinta would do, and fairly obviously stole some fire-needles; she just looked a bit uneasy and pretended she hadn’t seen. Well, I really was being humored. Wild possibilities of how I could drive everyone zaradann flitted through my brain, but I felt too basically fed up to pursue any of them.

We ate fifth meal at the Fire-Pit, then went and made our dresses in the deadly perfect sunshine of the Ilex Park, with a lot of jade leaves bashing us. In the middle of it all, the jade reminded me of the dragon in Jade Tower and all the other animals in Four BAA, and then of Lorun, and I started crying again. The tears got muddled in with the water dress and ruined it.

“Oh,” Thinta kept imploring, “oh, do stop, ooma.” I only managed it because I could see how upset she was getting. I’m not sure if it was sympathy that was disturbing her or embarrassment. Probably both.

We had sixth meal and Thinta enthusiastically paid for it, and then gave me a gentle fluttering sort of little talking to, on the sky-ship where we were eating it.

“You know,” she started, “everybody has silly times.”

“Do they?” I inquired unhelpfully.

“You know they do, ooma,” Thinta said. “Look at me and that business about wanting to be a cat thing, and the fur and the purring reflex that, thank goodness, the Committee was wise enough not to give me. Now I can see how ridiculous I was being and laugh at it. Ha, ha!” Did her laugh sound a bit strained?

“I don’t think you really laugh at it,” I told her callously. “I think you pretend to laugh, when really you’re furious you can’t sit and purr at me.”

“Oh, really,” said Thinta, looking as annoyed as Thinta can look, which means she just looks puzzled. The only time I’d ever seen her really angry was over the refused purring mechanism. “Anyway,” she said, “what I’m trying to say is, anyone can get over anything.”

“I see,” I said.

“Oh yes, really they can, ooma.”

“Perhaps they can,” I said, “but perhaps they shouldn’t.”

She couldn’t answer me. She tried but she couldn’t. Well, I couldn’t answer myself, could I?

I really did try, though, to get back into life as I’d known it, but it was like a tunic the wrong size; it didn’t fit me any more. If it ever had. I shopped and stole, bubble-rode and fire-rode, went and cursed the Robotics Museum, and married Hergal again, though I could feel he didn’t enjoy our afternoon very much. He was too worried I’d start crying or something all over him, though I very considerately didn’t. I went to the Dimension Palace and didn’t even get properly frightened, just thoroughly tosky, though I suppose it was the best result I’d got so far.

Finally I thought of the Dream Rooms.

I went to Fourth Sector’s version, which has purple clouds and floating cubicles, and took about eighty splits programming the robot to make sure I got a perfectly groshing fantasy. I didn’t even have any guilt feelings this time—my Q-R with the water carpet had indirectly done that for me, at least.

And there I was, this fantastically erotic and famous dancer of an ancient desert tribe. We’d been captured by another more powerful tribe and taken in chains out into the desert with them as slaves. We lay by night under the cold desert stars, glaring at their big, dark blue tents, and the biggest tent of all, which belonged to their chieftain. I’d never seen the chieftain, but apparently he’d seen me and heard of my reputation in the dancing line; now, at the beginning of my dream, he’d requested my presence before him in his huge tent, and sent me this groshing costume to wear. I got into it and admired myself in the mirror his servants held up for me. It was scarlet, embroidered with seed pearls and silver disks and bled-red tassels. I had thick black hair, oceans of it, and green eyes, and I looked insumatt. Then this old wise-woman of our tribe came clanking up in her chains, poor old thing, and drew me aside.

“You must kill him,” she said, not messing around or anything.

“How?” I said. I wasn’t overly bothered. I mean, we were all bred hard fierce, and brave (as usual) out in this desert.

“With your knife,” said the wise-woman. “Here, I saved it for you when we were raided.”

And there it was, this bone-handled deadly blade, given me by my maker in my infancy or something.