Alyx - Joanna Russ Read online

  He walked back along the line, looking her up and down— mostly down, for he was as tall as the rest of them; possibly a woman as small as herself was a kind of expensive rarity. He said, “I’m not going to do anything to you.”

  “No,” he said, “not to you; I’ll leave you here and pick you up later, Infant. We can all use you.” She looked innocent.

  “After I tick these Ops,” he went on, “after we get ’em melted—you’re going to see it, Infant—then I’ll wrap you up and come back for you later. Or maybe take a little now. We’ll see.

  “The question,” he added, “is which of you I will tick first. The question is which of you feather-loving Ops I will turn to ashes first and I think, after mature judgment and a lot of decisions and maybe just turning it over in my head, I say I think—”

  Gunnar threw himself at the man.

  He did so just as Alyx flashed to her knees and turned into an instant blur, just as Machine whipped up the crossbow and let go the bolt, just as Gunnar should have stood still and prayed to whatever gods guard amateur explorers—just at this moment he flung himself forward at the stranger’s feet. There was a flash of light and a high-pitched, horrible scream. Gunnar lay sprawled in the snow. The stranger, weapon dangling from one hand, bleeding in one small line from the belly where Machine’s bolt had hit him, sat in the snow and stared at nothing. Then he bent over and slid onto his side. Alyx ran to the man and snatched the gun from his grasp but he was unmistakably dead; she pulled one of her knives out of his forearm where it had hit him—but high, much too high, damn the balance of the stupid things!—hardly even spoiling his aim— and the other from his neck, grimacing horribly and leaping aside to keep from getting drenched. The corpse fell over on its face. Then she turned to Gunnar.

  Gunnar was getting up.

  “Well, well,” said Machine from between his teeth, “what— do—you—know!”

  “How the devil could I tell you were going to do anything!” shouted Gunnar.

  “Did you make that noise for effect,” said Machine, “or was it merely fright?”

  “Shut up, you!” cried Gunnar, his face pale.

  “Did you wish to engage our sympathies?” said Machine, “or did you intend to confuse the enemy? Was it electronic noise? Is it designed to foul up radar? Does it contribute to the electromagnetic spectrum? Has it a pattern? Does it scan?”

  Gunnar stepped forward, his big hands swinging. Machine raised the bow. Both men bent a little at the knees. Then in between them, pale and calm, stepped one of the nuns, looking first at one and then at the other until Gunnar turned his back and Machine—making a face—broke apart the crossbow and draped both parts over his shoulder.

  “Someone is hurt,” said the nun.

  Gunnar turned back. “That’s impossible!” he said. “Anyone in the way of that beam would be dead, not hurt.”

  “Someone,” repeated the nun, “is hurt, and she walked back towards the little knot the others had formed in the snow, clustering about someone on the ground. Gunnar shouted, “It’s not possible!”

  “It’s Raydos,” said Machine quietly, somewhere next to Alyx. “It’s not Iris. He just got the edge. The bastard had put it on diffuse. He’s alive,” and taking her by the elbow, he propelled her to the end of the line, where Raydos had been standing almost but not quite in profile, where the stranger had shot when his arm was knocked away and up from his aim on Gunnar, when he had already turned his weapon down on Gunnar because Gunnar was acting like a hero, and not tried to shoot Alyx, who could have dropped beneath the beam, twisted away and killed him before he could shoot again. Strike a man’s arm up into the air and it follows a sweeping curve.

  Right over Raydos’s face.

  And Raydos’s eyes.

  She refused to look at him after the first time. She pushed through the others to take a long look at the unconscious man’s face where he lay, his arms thrown out, in the snow: the precise line where his face began, the precise line where it ended, the fine, powdery, black char that had been carefully laid across the rest of it. Stirred by their breath, the black powder rose in fine spirals. Then she saw the fused circles of Raydos’s eye lenses: black, shiny black, little puddles resting as if in a valley; they still gave out an intense heat. She heard Gunnar say nervously “Put—put snow on it,” and she turned her back remarking, “Snow. And do what you have to do.” She walked slowly over to the transparent bubble. In the distance she could see some kind of activity going on over Raydos, things being brought out of his pack, all sorts of conferring going on. She carefully kicked snow over the dead body. She reflected that Paradise must know them all very well, must know them intimately, in fact, to find the levers to open them one by one until none of them were left or only she was left or none of them were left. Maudey. She stood aside carefully as Gunnar and Machine carried up something that was lacking a face—or rather, his face had turned lumpy and white—and put him in the transparent bubble. That is, Gunnar put him in, getting half in with him for the thing would not hold more than the head and arms of another occupant. Gunnar was taping Raydos to the seat and the walls and working on the control board. Then he said, “I’ll set the automatic location signal to turn itself off an hour after sundown; he did say he was cruising.”

  “So you know something,” said Machine. Gunnar went on, his voice a little high:

  “I can coordinate it for the Pole station.”

  “So you are worth something,” said Machine.

  “They won’t shoot him down,” said Gunnar quickly. “They would but I’ve set it for a distress call at the coordinate location. They’ll try to trap him.

  “That’s not easy,” he added, “but I think it’ll work. It’s a kind of paradox, but there’s an override. I’ve slowed him down as much as I can without shutting him off altogether, he may last, and I’ve tried to put in some indication of where we are and where we’re headed but it’s not equipped for that; I can’t send out a Standard call or they'll come and pick him up, I mean the others, of course, they must have this section pretty well under control or they wouldn’t be sending loners around here. And of course the heat burst registered, but they’ll think it’s him; he did say—”

  “Why don’t you write it, you bastard?” said Machine. “Write?” said Gunnar.

  “Write it on a piece of paper,” said Machine. “Do you know what paper is? He has it in his pack. That stuff he uses for drawing is paper. Write on it!”

  “I don’t have anything to write with,” said Gunnar.

  “You stupid bastard,” said Machine slowly, turning Raydos’s pack upside down so that everything fell out of it: pens, black stuff, packets of things taped together, food, a kind of hinged manuscript, all the medicine. “You stupid, electronic bastard,” he said, ripping a sheet from the manuscript, “this is paper. And this” (holding it out) “is artist’s charcoal. Take the charcoal and write on the paper. If you know how to write.”

  “That’s unnecessary,” said Gunnar, but he took the writing materials, removed his gloves and wrote laboriously on the paper, his hands shaking a little. He did not seem to be used to writing.

  “Now tape it to the wall,” said Machine. “No, the inside wall. Thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for your heroism. Thank you for your stupidity. Thank you—”

  “I’ll kill you!” cried Gunnar. Alyx threw up her arm and cracked him under the chin. He gasped and stumbled back. She turned to Machine. “You too,” she said, “you too. Now finish it.” Gunnar climbed half inside the bubble again and commenced clumsily making some last adjustments on the bank of instruments that hung in the air. The sun was setting: a short day. She watched the snow turn ruddy, ruddy all around, the fingerprints and smears on the bubble gone in a general, faint glow as the light diffused and failed, the sun sank, the man inside—who looked dead—wobbled back and forth as Gunnar’s weight changed the balance of the delicate little ship. It looked like an ornament almost, something to set on top of a s
pire, someone’s pearl.

  “Is he dead?” said Alyx. Machine shook his head. “Frozen,” he said. “We all have it in the packs. Slows you down. He may last.”

  “His eyes?” said Alyx.

  “Why, I didn’t think you cared,” said Machine, trying to make it light.

  "His eyes!”

  Machine shrugged a little uncomfortably. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said, “but” (here he laughed) “one would think you were in love with the man.”

  “I don’t know him,” said Alyx. “I never knew him.”

  “Then why all the fuss, Tiny?” he said.

  “You don’t have a word for it.”

  “The hell I don’t!” said Machine somewhat brutally. “I have words for everything. So the man was what we call an artist. All right. He used color on flat. So what? He can use sound. He can use things you stick your fingers into and they give you a jolt. He can use wires. He can use textures. He can use pulse-beats. He can use things that climb over you while you close your eyes. He can use combinations of drugs. He can use direct brain stimulation. He can use hypnosis. He can use things you walk on barefoot for all I care. It’s all respectable; if he gets stuck in a little backwater of his field, that’s his business; he can get out of it.”

  “Put his sketches in with him,” said Alyx.

  “Why?” said Machine.

  “Because you don’t have a word for it,” she said. He shrugged, a little sadly. He riffled the book that had come from Raydos’s pack, tearing out about half of it, and passed the sheets in to Gunnar. They were taped to Raydos’s feet.

  “Hell, he can still do a lot of things,” said Machine, trying to smile.

  “Yes,” said Alyx, “and you will come out of this paralyzed from the neck down.” He stopped smiling.

  “But you will do a lot of things,” she said. “Yes, you will get out of it. You will lose your body and Gunnar will lose his—his self-respect; he will make one more ghastly mistake and then another and another and in the end he will lose his soul at the very least and perhaps his life.”

  “You know all this,” said Machine.

  “Of course,” said Alyx, “of course I do. I know it all. I know that Gavrily will do something generous and brave and silly and because he never in his life has learned how to do it, we will lose Gavrily. And then Iris—no, Iris has had it already, I think, and of course the Heavenly Twins will lose nothing because they have nothing to lose. Maybe they will lose their religion or drop their pills down a hole. And I—well, I—my profession, perhaps, or whatever loose junk I have lying around, because this blasted place is too good, you see, too easy; we don’t meet animals, we don’t meet paid professional murderers, all we meet is our own stupidity. Over and over. It’s a picnic. It’s a damned picnic. And Iris will come through because she never lives above her means. And a picnic is just her style.”

  “What will you lose?” said Machine, folding his arms across his chest.

  “I will lose you,” she said unsteadily, “what do you think of that?” He caught her in his arms, crushing the breath out of her.

  “I like it,” he whispered sardonically. “I like it, Tiny, because I am jealous. I am much too jealous. If I thought you didn’t like me, I’d kill myself and if I thought you liked Iris more than me, I’d kill her. Do you hear me?”

  “Don’t be an ass,” she said. “Let me go.”

  “I’ll never let you go. Never. I’ll die. With you.”

  Gunnar backed ponderously out of the bubble. He closed the door, running his hands carefully over the place where the door joined the rest of the ship until the crack disappeared. He seemed satisfied with it then. He watched it, although nothing seemed to happen for a few minutes; then the bubble rose noiselessly off the snow, went up faster and faster into the evening sky as if sliding along a cable and disappeared into the afterglow. It was going north. Alyx tried to pull away but Machine held on to her, grinning at his rival as the latter turned around, absently dusting his hands together. Then Gunnar groped for his gloves, put them on, absently looking at the two, at the others who had shared the contents of Raydos’s pack and were flattening the pack itself into a shape that could be carried in an empty food container. There was the corpse, the man everyone had forgotten. Gunnar looked at it impersonally. He looked at Iris, the nuns, Gavrily, the other two: only seven of them now. His gloved hands dusted themselves together. He looked at nothing.

  “Well?” drawled Machine.

  “I think we will travel a little now,” said Gunnar; “I think we will travel by starlight.” He repeated the phrase, as if it pleased him. “By starlight,” he said, “yes.”

  “By snowlight?” said Machine, raising his eyebrows.

  “That too,” said Gunnar, looking at something in the distance, “yes—that too—”

  “Gunnar!” said Alyx sharply. His gaze settled on her.

  “I’m all right,” he said quietly. “I don’t care who you play with,” and he plodded over to the others, bent over, very big.

  “I shall take you tonight,” said Machine between his teeth; “I shall take you right before the eyes of that man!”

  She brought the point of her elbow up into his ribs hard enough to double him over; then she ran through the powdery snow to the front of the little line that had already formed. Gunnar was leading them. Her hands were icy. She took his arm—it was unresponsive, nothing but a heavy piece of meat—and said, controlling her breathing, for she did not want him to know that she had been running—“I believe it is getting warmer.”

  He said nothing.

  “I mention this to you,” Alyx went on, “because you are the only one of us who knows anything about weather. Or about machinery. We would be in a bad way without you.”

  He still said nothing.

  “I am very grateful,” she said, “for what you did with the ship. There is nobody here who knows a damn thing about that ship, you know. No one but you could have—” (she was about to say saved Raydos’s life) “done anything with the control board. I am grateful. We are all grateful.

  “Is it going to snow?” she added desperately, “is it going to snow?”

  “Yes,” said Gunnar. “I believe it is.”

  “Can you tell me why?” said she. “I know nothing about it. I would appreciate it very much if you could tell me why.”

  “Because it is getting warmer.”

  “Gunnar!” she cried. “Did you hear us?”

  Gunnar stopped walking. He turned to her slowly and slowly looked down at her, blankly, a little puzzled, frowning a little.

  “I don’t remember hearing anything,” he said. Then he added sensibly, “That ship is a very good ship; it’s insulated; you don’t hear anything inside.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Alyx, her voice almost failing, “and tell me why it’s going to snow.”

  He told her, and she hung on his arm, pretending to listen, for hours.

  They walked by starlight until a haze covered the stars; it got warmer, it got slippery. She tried to remember their destination by the stars. They stopped on Paradise’s baby mountains, under the vast, ill-defined shadow of something going up, up, a slope going up until it melted into the gray sky, for the cloud cover shone a little, just as the snow shone a little, the light just enough to see by and not enough to see anything at all. When they lay down there was a pervasive feeling of falling to the left. Iris kept trying to clutch at the snow. Alyx told them to put their feet downhill and so they did, lying in a line and trying to hold each other’s hands. Gunnar went off a little to one side, to watch—or rather to listen. Everything was indistinct. Five minutes after everyone had settled down—she could still hear their small readjustments, the moving about, the occasional whispering—she discerned someone squatting at her feet, his arms about his knees, balanced just so.

  She held out one arm and he pulled her to her feet, putting his arms around her: Machine’s face, very close in the white darkness. “Over there,” he said,
jerking his head towards the place where Gunnar was, perhaps sitting, perhaps standing, a kind of blot against the gray sky.

  “No,” said Alyx.

  “Why not?” said Machine in a low, mocking voice. “Do you think he doesn’t know?”

  She said nothing.

  “Do you think there’s anyone here who doesn’t know?” Machine continued, a trifle brutally. “When you go off, you raise enough hell to wake the dead.”

  She nudged him lightly in the ribs, in the sore place, just enough to loosen his arms; and then she presented him with the handle of one of her knives, nudging him with that also, making him take step after step backwards, while he whispered angrily:

  “What the hell!

  “Stop it!

  “What are you doing!

  “What the devil!”

  Then they were on the other side of the line of sleepers, several meters away.

  “Here,” she whispered, holding out the knife, “take it, take it. Finish him off. Cut off his head.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” snapped Machine.

  “But not with me," she said; “oh, no!” and when he threw her down onto the snow and climbed on top of her, shaking her furiously, she only laughed, calling him a baby, teasing him, tickling him through his suit, murmuring mocking love-words, half in Greek, the better to infuriate him. He wound his arms around her and pulled, crushing her ribs, her fingers, smothering her with his weight, the knees of his long legs digging one into her shin and one into her thigh; there would be spectacular bruises tomorrow.

  “Kill me,” she whispered ecstatically. “Go on, kill me, kill me! Do what you want!” He let her go, lifting himself up on his hands, moving his weight off her. He stared down at her, the mask of a very angry young man. When she had got her breath back a little, she said: