DON’T BITE THE SUN
Tanith Lee
www.sfgateway.com
Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
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Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Transcriber’s Note
Glossary of Jang Slang
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Four
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Five
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Website
Also by Tanith Lee
Author Bio
Copyright
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Although I have put the Four BEE into equivalent modern English, the Jang slang vocabulary which the writer uses pales in translation. I have therefore left the sixteen or so odd words she employs untouched, and included on the following page a glossary, which provides an adequate, if imperfect, guide to what they mean.
Glossary of Jang Slang
attlevey
Hello.
dalika
Violent argument.
derisann
Lovely, beautiful.
droad
Bored out of one’s mind.
drumdik
Utterly horrible, the most ghastly thing.
farathoom
Bloody, fucking hell.
floop
Cunt. See also thralldrap.
groshing
Fabulous, marvelous.
insumatt
Unsurpassable.
onk
Mild ejaculation, e.g., bother.
ooma
darling, honey.
selt
Slow on the uptake. ‘Con’-able.
soolka
Well-groomed. Applied by Jang only to non-Jang.
thalldrap
See floop.
tosky
Neurotic.
V ….n
A word never written in full by the autobiographer. Obviously pretty bad.
zaradann
Insane, nuts.
General Terms
Glar
Early Four BEE title, similar to professor. The term hung on as a polite name for Q-R teachers at the hypno-schools, but otherwise was extinct by this time.
mid-vrek
Middle period of any vrek, lasting forty units.
rorl
Four BEE equivalent of a century.
split
Four BEE minute.
unit
Four BEE day.
vrek
Period of one hundred units.
My friend Hergal had killed himself again. This was the fortieth time he had crashed his bird-plane on to the Zeefahr Monument and had to have a new body made. And when I went to visit him at Limbo, I was wandering around for ages before the robot found him for me. He was dark this time, about a foot taller, with very long hair and a mustache, all glittery gold fibers, and these silly wings growing out of his shoulders and ankles.
“Attlevey, Hergal,” I said.
“Attlevey,” said Hergal, and flapped his wings about. “Groshing, aren’t they? No strength, of course, just for show. Have to get another new bird-plane if I fancy a flight.”
“I thought,” I remarked, popping a button for a floating chair, even though mannerless old Hergal hadn’t bothered, “that the Committee might have canceled your license to fly.”
“Ha ha!” gaily chortled Hergal. “Wouldn’t dare.”
“I do wish, though, you’d pick somewhere else to crash down on top of. It gets rather monotonous, always the boring old Zeefahr. I mean, how about trying the Robotics Museum? You might even manage to crack the roof, and that must be an achievement.”
Hergal tugged his mustache.
“Hmm,” Hergal said.
“Anyway,” I said, giving my messenger bee a good kick—it’s always dozing off and falling on me in the street, usually when hordes of people are about—“I’ve brought you some ecstasy pills and a sixth-dimensional cube to contemplate.”
“Oh, Good,” said Hergal. I could see his mind (?) was on higher things than ecstasy and contemplation. I remembered the nasty time Hergal and I got married for mid-vrek, down at the Prism Playgrounds, and then lost each other, and I ended up stealing lots of glass dresses out of confusion, and having my dreams analyzed, and buying a desert animal from Four BOO that was fierce and furry, and snored all the way home in the bubble and then bit me at the last moment, when I’d actually decided I could stand it being fierce and furry, and snoring.
Hergal, of course, just rented a bird-plane and crashed on top of the Zeefahr Monument. That was number nine. What I was trying to say was that Hergal’s mind had been on higher things then, or so he said.
“Listen, Hergal,” I stated, “I’m afraid I’ve put in an order to have you officially cut out of my circle of friends. It’s not that I don’t like you. I mean, you’re really lovely, particularly with your—er—wings, but I’m just tired of everyone coming up and saying to me: ‘Is it true you know that floop Hergal? Do tell!’”
“I see,” said Hergal. He didn’t even have the politeness to cry. Everyone in the Jang always cries when they’re officially cut out of circles.
“Oh well, there’s nothing more to be said then, Hergal.” I got down from the chair and bounced on the crystallize-rubber floor. My bee fell
