Drinking Sapphire Wine by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee [Lee, Tanith]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780575120457
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2015-12-16T23:00:00+00:00

8

First unit of my second vrek in the valley.

Me on the veranda eating melon pancakes, thinking lazily of the work we were going to do today, Jaska, Borss, Yay, and I.

Water mixer on the prowl, dimly visible through an early haze, now and again hidden by trees, ferns, shrubs. A confused snake courting itself in the grass about nine feet off. Nose to tail: “Come on, give us a kiss.” The tail coyly refusing.

Then a familiar-unfamiliar sound in the sky, the snake going stiff as a ramrod, and I walking out and staring up.

Sometimes bird-planes had passed over, actually far to the west. Rarely did you catch their noise. Purely at random, I had established my haven well off the sand-ship and plane routes. This abomination, however, was directly overhead and presently swooping earthward.

Farathoom, and similar oaths. Watch out for the purple trees! (I had a name for everything—generally analogous. This saved muddle. Sometimes.) No, the purple trees had escaped barbering. The thing was going to land right in the cactus roses. It did.

Pancake still in hand, I thudded from the porch and ran to the plane. Very garish it was, and drizzling colored neons, but I didn’t bother with that.

“Get the Infinity off my flowers, blast you! Look what you’ve done.”

The anticipated robot voice came melodiously from the opening door:

“No need for alarm.”

“I’m not alarmed. But you’re going to be if you don’t move that tin can of yours.”

Just then the visitor emerged, a roly-poly machine, somehow conveying broad smiles, wires waving, lights popping on and off. It had Flash Center written all over it.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Some soup-brained promok spotted a fern in the desert, and mentioned it to some other Older promok at a Flash Center, and now they’ve sent a reporting machine to collect some pulchritudinous flashes to be pulchritudinously flashed all over Four flooping BEE. Yes?”

“Oh, yes,” chortled the flash machine, programmed by some incorrigible moron to sound like the worst type of human jolly. They probably thought the distraught Outcast would be glad to chirrup away to something human-sounding, however obnoxious.

“Well, old ooma, you can just hop back on your plane and go,” I said, “before I turn the water mixer on you.”

The flash machine looked uneasy somehow. Maybe it wasn’t rustproofed.

“Oh, but please. Everyone’s ever so interested. There’s even going to be a special interruption to Picture-Vision, and a perma-film of all this put on for five whole splits.”

That rocked me. The last time that had happened had been when—when—well, when? Ever? Surely the Committee hadn’t thought this up? Perhaps people were interested, or some people. Perhaps Danor might want to know how I was making out. Or Hergal. Yes, I could just see Hergal, reclining somewhere, semi-ecstatic, with golden limber limbs elegantly stretched like one of Thinta’s cats. He might even get romantic over me for half a split now I was in noncombatant female form. Thinta, on the other hand, liked me less that way. Possibly she would mutter something like: “I tried and TRIED with her.

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