Alyx - Joanna Russ Read online

  Nobody was listening. She turned around and stared at them. For a moment she could not think, only smell and stare, and then something shifted abruptly inside her head and she could name them again: Gunnar, Machine, Raydos, Maudey, Iris, Gavrily, the two nuns. She had been talking in her own language. They shambled along, leaning forward against the pull of the hip-packs, ploughing up the snow in their exhaustion, these huge, soft people to whom one could not say anything of any consequence. Their faces were drawn with fatigue. She motioned them to stop and they toppled down into the snow without a word, Iris’s cheek right in the cold stuff itself and the two nuns collapsed across each other in a criss-cross. They had worn, she believed, a symbol on a chain around their necks something like the symbol... but she did not want to fall back into her own speech again. She felt extremely stupid. “I am sorry that you’re tired,” she said.

  “No, no,” muttered Gunnar, his legs straight out in the snow, staring ahead.

  “We’ll take a break,” she said, wondering where the phrase had come from all of a sudden. The sun was hardly halfway down in the sky. She let them rest for an hour or more until they began to talk; then she forced them to their feet and began it all again, the nightmare of stumbling, slipping, sliding, the unmistakable agonies of plodding along with cramped legs and a drained body, the endless pull of the weight at one’s back. . . . She remembered what the lieutenant had said about people deprived of their electromagnetic spectrum. Long before nightfall she stopped them and let them revive while she scouted around for animal tracks—or human tracks—or anything—but found nothing. Paradise was a winter sportsman’s—well, paradise. She asked about animals, but nobody knew for certain or nobody was telling, although Gunnar volunteered the information that Paradise had not been extensively mapped. Maudey complained of a headache. They ate again, this time from a bag marked Two-C, still with nothing dried (Why carry all that weight in water? Alyx thought, remembering how the desert people would ride for weeks on nothing but ground wheat), stowed empty, deflated Two-C into their packs and lay down—right in the middle of a vast, empty snow-field. It gave them all the chills. Alyx lay a little apart, to let them talk about her as she was sure they would, and then crept closer. They were talking about her. She made a face and retreated again. A little later she got them up and into the hills above until at sunset it looked as if they would have to sleep in the open. She left them huddled together and went looking about for a cave, but found nothing, until, coming around the path at the edge of a rather sharp drop, she met Machine coming the other way.

  “What the devil—!” she exclaimed, planting herself in his way, arms akimbo, face tilted up to look into his.

  “Cave,” he said blandly and walked up the side of the hill with his long legs, around above her, and down on to the path. He even got back to the others faster than she did, though sweat was running from under his hood.

  “All right,” said Alyx as she rejoined them, “it’s found a cave,” but she found them all standing up ready to go, most yawning, all trying not to stagger, and Gunnar beaming heartily in a way that made her wish she had hit him lower down, much lower down, when she had the chance. Professional, she thought. “He told us,” said Maudey with her head in the air, “before you came,” and the troop of them marched—more or less—after the bald-headed boy, who had found a shallow depression in the rock where they could gather in relative comfort. If there had been a wind, although there was no wind on Paradise, the place would have sheltered them; if it had been snowing, although it was not snowing on Paradise, the place would have protected them; and if anyone had been looking for them, although apparently no one was, the place would have afforded a partial concealment. They all got together; they sat down; some of them threw back their hoods; and then they began to talk. They talked and talked and talked. They discussed whether Maudey had behaved impatiently towards Iris, or whether Iris had tried to attract Gunnar, or whether the nuns were participating enough in the group interaction, with due allowance made for their religious faith, of course, and whether the relationship between Raydos and Gunnar was competitive, and what Gavrily felt about the younger men, and whether he wanted to sleep with Iris, and on and on and on about how they felt about each other and how they ought to feel about each other and how they had felt about each other with an insatiability that stunned Alyx and a wealth of detail that fascinated her, considering that all these interactions had been expressed by people staggering with fatigue, under a load of eleven kilos per person, and exposed to a great deal of unaccustomed exercise. She felt sorry for Machine. She wished she had a Trivia herself. She lay at the mouth of the cave until she could not stand it; then she retreated to the back and lay on her stomach until her elbows galled her, then she took off into the snow in front of the cave where there was a little light and lay on her back, watching the strange stars.

  “We do it all the time, I’m afraid,” said a man’s voice beside her. Raydos, she thought instantly. Machine would have said "they.”

  “It doesn’t—” he went on, “it doesn’t mean—well, it doesn't mean anything, really. It’s a kind of habit.”

  She said nothing.

  “I came out,” he said, “to apologize for us and to ask you about the watch. I’ve explained it to the others. I will take the first watch.

  “I have read about such things,” he added proudly.

  Still she said nothing.

  “I wish you would repeat to me,” he went on slowly, and she realized he was trying to talk simply to her, “what you said this morning in the other language.”

  “I can’t,” she said, and then she added, feeling stupid, “the witty saying of. . . of the Prince of Tyre.”

  “The epigram,” he said patiently.

  “Epigram,” she repeated.

  “What did the Prince of Tyre say?”

  “He said,” she translated, feeling her way desperately, “that in any . . . time . . . any time you . . . have something, whatever tendencies—whatever factors in a situation you have, whatever of these can—can unpredict—”

  “Can go wrong,” said he.

  “Can go wrong,” she parroted, caught halfway between two worlds. “Can wrong itself. It—” but here the man beside her burst into such a roar of laughter that she turned to look at him.

  “The proverbial Third Law,” he said. “Whatever can go wrong, will,” and he burst into laughter again. He was big, but they were all big; in the faint glimmer of the snow-field . . .

  His hood was back; his hair was pale.

  Gunnar.

  Alone once more, she lay several meters farther out with her arms wrapped about herself, thinking a bit savagely that the “witty saying” of His Highness had been expressed in two words, not five, both of them punning, both rhymed and each with a triple internal assonance that exactly contrasted with the other.

  Damned barbarians! she snapped to herself, and fell asleep.

  The next day it began to snow, the soft, even snow of Paradise, hiding their footprints and the little bags of excrement they buried here and there. The insulated suits were ingenious. Her people began to talk to her, just a little, condescendingly but trying to be affable, more and more cheerful as they neared Point B, where they would need her no more, where she could dwindle into a memory, an anecdote, a party conversation: ‘‘Did you know, I once met the most fascinating—” They really had very little imagination, Alyx thought. In their place she would be asking everything: where she came from, who she was, how she lived, the desert people who worshiped the wind god, what the Tyrians ate, their economic system, their families, their beliefs, their feelings, their clothes, the Egyptians, the Minoans, how the Minoans made those thin, dyed bowls, how they traded ostrich eggs and perfumes from Egypt, what sort of ships they sailed, how it felt to rob a house, how it felt to cut a throat. . . . But all they did was talk about themselves.

  “You ought to have cosmetic surgery,” said Maudey. “I’ve had it on my face and my breasts.
It’s ingenious. Of course I had a good doctor. And you have to be careful dyeing eyebrows and eyelashes, although the genetic alterations are usually pretty stable. But they might spread, you know. Can you imagine having a blue forehead?”

  “I ran away from home,” said Iris, “at the age of fifteen and joined a Youth Core. Almost everyone has Youth Cores, although mine wasn’t a delinquent Youth Core and some people will tell you that doesn’t count. But let me tell you, it changed my life. It’s better than hypnotic psychotherapy. They call it a Core because it forms the core of your adolescent rebellion, don’t you see, and I would have been nobody without it, absolutely nobody, it changed my whole life and all my values. Did you ever run away from home?”

  “Yes,” said Alyx. “I starved.”

  “Nobody starves any more,” said Iris. “A Youth Core to fit each need. I joined a middle-status Youth Core. Once you’re past fourteen you needn’t drag—um—your family into everything. We forget about that. It’s much better.”

  “Some people call me a Conamon,” said Gavrily, “but where would we be without them? There are commercial wars and wars; you know all about that. The point is there are no more wars. I mean real wars. That would be a terrible thing. And if you get caught in a commercial war, it’s your own fault, you see. Mixed interests. Mixed economy. I deal in people. Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Some people would say I manage people, but I say I help them. I work with them. I form values. Can you imagine what it would be like without us? No one to bring your group interests to. No one to mediate between you and the army or you and business or you and government. Why, there wouldn’t be any local government, really, though of course I’m not Gov; I’m Con. Mixed interests. It’s the only way.”

  “Wrap-arounds!” said Raydos contemptuously. “Anybody can build a wrap-around. Simplest thing in the world. The problem is to recover the purity of the medium—I hope I’m not boring you— and to recover the purity of the medium you have to withdraw within its boundaries, not stretch them until they crack. I’ve done environments until I’m sick of them. I want something you can walk around, not something that walks around you. Lights geared to heartbeats, drug combinations, vertigo—I’m through with all that; it’s mere vulgarity. Have you ever tried to draw something? Just draw something? Wait a minute; stand still.” (And he sketched a few lines on a piece of paper.) “There! That’s avant-garde for you!”

  “The consciousness,” said the nuns, speaking softly one after the other, “must be expanded to include the All. That is the only true church. Of course, that is what we believe. We do not wish to force our beliefs on others. We are the ancient church of consciousness and Buddha, nearly six hundred years old; I do hope that when we get back you’ll attend a service with us. Sex is only part of the ceremony. The drugs are the main part. Of course we’re not using them now, but we do carry them. The lieutenant knew we would never touch them. Not while there’s the possibility of violence. The essence of violence violates consciousness while the consciousness of expanded consciousness correlates with the essence of the All which is Love, extended Love and the deepening and expanding of experience implied by the consciousness-expanded consciousness.”

  “You do understand,” they chorused anxiously, “don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Alyx, “perfectly.”

  Gunnar talked passionately about electronics.

  “Now there must be some way,” he said, “to neutralize this electromagnetic watch-grid they’ve set up or to polarize it. Do you think polarization would ring the alarm? It might be damn fan! We’re only behaving like parts of the landscape now—you will stop me if you don’t understand, won’t you—but there must be regions in the infra-bass where the shock waves—damn! Paradise doesn’t have faults and quakes—well, then, the ultra-hard—they must have the cosmic rays down to the twentieth place—somehow— If I had only brought—you know, I think I could rig up some kind of interference—of course they’d spot that—but just think of the equipment—”

  Machine said nothing at all. She took to walking with Machine. They walked through the soft, falling snow of Paradise in absolute silence under a sky that dropped feathers like the sky in a fairy tale, like a sky she had never seen before that made endless pillows and hummocks of the rounded stones of Paradise, stones just large enough to sit on, as if someone had been before them all the way providing armchairs and tables. Machine was very restful. On the tenth day she took his arm and leaned against him briefly; on the eleventh day he said:

  “Where do you come from?”

  “I come,” she said softly, “from great cities and palaces and back-alleys and cemeteries and rotten ships.

  “And where,” she added, “do you come from?”

  “Nowhere!” said Machine—and he spat on the snow.

  On the sixteenth day of their ten-day journey they found Base B. Everyone had been excited all day—“picnicky” Alyx called it. Maudey had been digging her fingers into her hair and lamenting the absence of something called an electric tease; Gavrily was poking both women, a little short of breath; and Gunnar displayed his smile—that splendid smile—a little too often to be accounted for by the usual circumstances and laughed a good deal to himself.

  “Oh golly, oh gosh, oh golly, oh golly, oh gosh!” sang Iris.

  “Is that what they taught you at your Core?” said Raydos dryly.

  “Yes,” said Iris sniffishly. "Do you mind?” and she went on singing the words while Raydos made a face. “Didn’t you go to a Core?” said Iris and when Raydos informed her that he had gone to a School (whatever that was) instead, Iris sang “Oh golly, oh gosh” so loud that Alyx told her to stop.

  “Animals don’t sing,” said Alyx.

  “Well, I hope you’re not being moralistic—” Iris began.

  “Animals,” said Alyx, “don’t sing. People sing. People can be caught. People can be killed. Stop singing.”

  “But we’re so near,” said Gunnar.

  “Come on,” said Gavrily. He began to run. Maudey was shepherding the nuns, chattering excitedly; everything was there—the line of boulders, the hill, a little dip in the snow, up another hill (a steep one this time) and there was Base B. Everybody could go home now. It was all over. They ran up to the top of the hill and nearly tumbled over one another in confusion, Gavrily with his arms spread out against the sky, one of the nuns fallen on one knee and Iris nearly knocking Maudey over.

  Base B was gone. In the little dell where there should have been a metal shed with a metal door leading underground, to safety, to home, to the Army, to a room where the ceiling whirled so familiarly (“a little bit of home”) and coiled thingamajigs which ate whatever you dropped on the grassy floor, there was no metal shed and no metal door. There was something like a splotch of metal foil smashed flat and a ragged hole in the middle of it, and as they watched, something indeterminate came out of the hole. There was a faint noise in the sky.

  “Scatter!” cried Alyx. “Down on your knees!” and as they stood there gaping, she slammed the three nearest across the face and then the others so that when the air vehicle—no one looked up to get a clear view of it—came barreling over the horizon, they were all down on their hands and knees, pretending to be animals. Alyx got down just in time. When the thing had gone, she dared to look into the dell again, where the indeterminate thing had split into four things, which stood at the edges of an exact square while a box the size of a small room floated slowly down between them. The moment it landed they burrowed into it, or were taking it apart; she could not tell. “Lie flat,” said Alyx softly. “Don’t talk. Gunnar, use your binoculars.” No decent knife, she thought wryly, not even a fire, but these marvelous things we do have.

  “I don’t see—” began Iris spiritedly.

  “Shut up,” said Alyx. He was focusing the binoculars. She knew about lenses because she had learned to do it with her own pair. Finally he took them away from his eyes and stared for a few moments into the snow. Then he said, “You can sta
nd up now.”

  “Is it safe?” cried one of the nuns. “Can we go down now?”

  “The snow makes it hard to see,” said Gunnar slowly, “but I do not think so. No, I do not think so. Those are commercial usu-forms, unpacking a food storage container. They are not Army. Army never uses commercial equipment.”

  “I think,” he said, “that Base B has been taken,” and he began quite openly and unashamedly to cry. The snow of Paradise (for it had begun to snow) fell on his cheeks and mingled with his tears, fell as beautifully as feathers from pillows, as if Hera were shaking out the feather quilts of Heaven while the amateur explorer cried and the seven people who had looked to him as their last hope looked first at each other—but there was no help there—and finally—hesitantly—but frightened, oh were they frightened!—at Alyx.