Alyx - Joanna Russ Read online

  Send me a piece of the Moon, said Alyx silently, send me something I can keep, and turning away she started out between the walls of the Moondrom, which are walls that one cannot see, through the cave that looks like an enormous sea of fog; and if you forget that it was made for civilized beings, it begins to look, once you have lost your way, like an endless cave, an endless fog, through which you will wander forever.

  But of course she found her way out, finally.

  At the exit—and it was the right exit, the one with billowing smoke that shone ten thousand colors from the lights in the floor and gave you, as you crossed it, the faint, unpleasant sensation of being turned slowly upside down, there where ladies’ cloaks billowed and transparent clothing seemed to dissolve in streams of fire—

  Stood Machine. Her heart stopped for a moment, automatically. The fifth or sixth time that day, she estimated.

  “God save you, mister,” she said.

  He did not move.

  “They tell me you’ll be gone in a few weeks,” she said. “I’ll be sorry.”

  He said nothing.

  “They also tell me,” she went on, “that I am going to teach my special and peculiar skills in a special and peculiar little school, for they seem to think our pilgrimage a success, despite its being full of their own inexcusable blunders, and they also seem to think that my special and peculiar skills are detachable from my special and peculiar attitudes. Like Iris’s hair. I think they will find they are wrong.”

  He began to dissolve.

  “Raydos is blind,” she said, “stone blind, did you know that? Some kind of immune reaction; when you ask them, they pull a long face and say that medicine can’t be expected to do everything. A foolproof world and full of fools. And then they tape wires on my head and ask me how it feels to be away from home; and they shake their heads when I tell them that I am not away from home; and then they laugh a little—just a little—when I tell them that I have never had a home.

  “And then,” she said, “I tell them that you are dead.”

  He disappeared.

  “We’ll give them a run for their money,” she said. “Oh yes we will! By God we will! Eh, love?” and she stepped through the smoke, which now contained nothing except the faint, unpleasant sensation of being turned slowly upside down.

  Iris may turn out to be surprisingly accurate, she thought, about the Great Trans-Temporal Cadre of Heroes and Heroines.

  Even if the only thing trans-temporal about them is their attitudes. The attitudes that are not detachable from my special and peculiar skills.

  If I have anything to say about it.

  But that's another story.

  The Second Inquisition

  If a man can resist the influences of his townsfolk, if he can cut free from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip, the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition.

  —John Jay Chapman

  I often watched our visitor reading in the living room, sitting under the floor lamp near the new, standing Philco radio, with her long, long legs stretched out in front of her and the pool of light on her book revealing so little of her face: brownish, coppery features so marked that she seemed to be a kind of freak and hair that was reddish black but so rough that it looked like the things my mother used for scouring pots and pans. She read a great deal, that summer. If I ventured out of the archway, where I was not exactly hiding but only keeping in the shadow to watch her read, she would often raise her face and smile silently at me before beginning to read again, and her skin would take on an abrupt, surprising pallor as it moved into the light. When she got up and went into the kitchen with the gracefulness of a stork, for something to eat, she was almost too tall for the doorways; she went on legs like a spider’s, with long swinging arms and a little body in the middle, the strange proportions of the very tall. She looked down at my mother’s plates and dishes from a great, gentle height, remarkably absorbed; and asking me a few odd questions, she would bend down over whatever she was going to eat, meditate on it for a few moments like a giraffe, and then straightening up back into the stratosphere, she would pick up the plate in one thin hand, curling around it fingers like legs, and go back gracefully into the living room. She would lower herself into the chair that was always too small, curl her legs around it, become dissatisfied, settle herself, stretch them out again—I remember so well those long, hard, unladylike legs—and begin again to read.

  She used to ask, “What is that? What is that? And what is this?” but that was only at first.

  My mother, who disliked her, said she was from the circus and we ought to try to understand and be kind. My father made jokes. He did not like big women or short hair—which was still new in places like ours—or women who read, although she was interested in his carpentry and he liked that.

  But she was six feet four inches tall; this was in 1925.

  My father was an accountant who built furniture as a hobby; we had a gas stove which he actually fixed once when it broke down and some outdoor tables and chairs he had built in the back yard. Before our visitor came on the train for her vacation with us, I used to spend all my time in the back yard, being underfoot, but once we had met her at the station and she shook hands with my father—I think she hurt him when she shook hands—I would watch her read and wish that she might talk to me.

  She said: “You are finishing high school?”

  I was in the archway, as usual; I answered yes.

  She looked up at me again, then down at her book. She said, “This is a very bad book.” I said nothing. Without looking up, she tapped one finger on the shabby hassock on which she had put her feet. Then she looked up and smiled at me. I stepped tentatively from the floor to the rug, as reluctantly as if I were crossing the Sahara; she swung her feet away and I sat down. At close view her face looked as if every race in the world had been mixed and only the worst of each kept; an American Indian might look like that, or Ikhnaton from the encyclopedia, or a Swedish African, a Maori princess with the jaw of a Slav. It occurred to me suddenly that she might be a Negro, but no one else had ever seemed to think so, possibly because nobody in our town had ever seen a Negro. We had none. They were “colored people.”

  She said, “You are not pretty, yes?”

  I got up. I said, “My father thinks you’re a freak.”

  “You are sixteen,” she said, “sit down,” and I sat down. I crossed my arms over my breasts because they were too big, like balloons. Then she said, “I am reading a very stupid book. You will take it away from me, yes?’’

  “No,” I said.

  “You must,” she said, “or it will poison me, sure as God,” and from her lap she plucked up The Green Hat: A Romance, gold letters on green binding, last year’s bestseller which I had had to swear never to read, and she held it out to me, leaning back in her chair with that long arm doing all the work, the book enclosed in a cage of fingers wrapped completely around it. I think she could have put those fingers around a basketball. I did not take it.

  “Go on,” she said, “read it, go on, go away,” and I found myself at the archway, by the foot of the stairs with The Green Hat: A Romance in my hand. I turned it so the title was hidden. She was smiling at me and had her arms folded back under her head. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Your body will be in fashion by the time of the next war.” I met my mother at the top of the stairs and had to hide the book from her, my mother said, “Oh, the poor woman!” She was carrying some sheets. I went to my room and read through almost the whole night, hiding the book in the bedclothes when I was through. When I slept, I dreamt of Hispano-Suizas, of shingled hair and tragic eyes; of women with painted lips who had Affairs, who went night after night with Jews to low dives, who lived as they pleased, who had miscarriages in expensive Swiss clinics; of midnight swims, of desperation, of money, of illicit love, of a beautiful Englishman and getting into a taxi with him while wearing a cloth-of-silver cloak and a silver turban like the ones shown in the society page
s of the New York City newspapers.

  Unfortunately our guest’s face kept recurring in my dream, and because I could not make out whether she was amused or bitter or very much of both, it really spoiled everything.

  My mother discovered the book the next morning. I found it next to my plate at breakfast. Neither my mother nor my father made any remark about it; only my mother kept putting out the breakfast things with a kind of tender, reluctant smile. We all sat down, finally, when she had put out everything, and my father helped me to rolls and eggs and ham. Then he took off his glasses and folded them next to his plate. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. Then he looked at the book and said in a tone of mock surprise, “Well! What’s this?”

  I didn’t say anything. I only looked at my plate.

  “I believe I’ve seen this before,” he said. “Yes, I believe I have.” Then he asked my mother, “Have you seen this before?” My mother made a kind of vague movement with her head. She had begun to butter some toast and was putting it on my plate. I knew she was not supposed to discipline me; only my father was. “Eat your egg,” she said. My father, who had continued to look at The Green Hat: A Romance with the same expression of unvarying surprise, finally said:

  “Well! This isn’t a very pleasant thing to find on a Saturday morning, is it?”

  I still didn’t say anything, only looked at my food. I heard my mother say worriedly, “She’s not eating, Ben,” and my father put his hand on the back of my chair so I couldn’t push it away from the table, as I was trying to do.

  “Of course you have an explanation for this,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  I said nothing.

  “Of course she does,” he said, “doesn’t she, Bess? You wouldn’t hurt your mother like this. You wouldn’t hurt your mother by stealing a book that you knew you weren’t supposed to read and for very good reason, too. You know we don’t punish you. We talk things over with you. We try to explain. Don’t we?” I nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “Then where did this book come from?”

  I muttered something; I don’t know what.

  “Is my daughter angry?” said my father. “Is my daughter being rebellious?”

  “She told you all about it!” I blurted out. My father’s face turned red.

  “Don’t you dare talk about your mother that way!” he shouted, standing up. “Don’t you dare refer to your mother in that way!”

  “Now, Ben—” said my mother.

  “Your mother is the soul of unselfishness,” said my father, “and don’t you forget it, missy; your mother has worried about you since the day you were born and if you don’t appreciate that, you can damn well—”

  “Ben!” said my mother, shocked.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and then I said, “I’m very sorry, Mother.” My father sat down. My father had a mustache and his hair was parted in the middle and slicked down; now one lock fell over the part in front and his whole face was gray and quivering. He was staring fixedly at his coffee cup. My mother came over and poured coffee for him; then she took the coffeepot into the kitchen and when she came back she had milk for me. She put the glass of milk on the table near my plate. Then she sat down again. She smiled tremblingly at my father, then she put her hand over mine on the table and said:

  “Darting, why did you read that book?”

  “Well?” said my father from across the table.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then:

  “Good morning!” and

  “Good morning!” and

  “Good morning!” said our guest cheerfully, crossing the dining room in two strides, and folding herself carefully down into her breakfast chair, from where her knees stuck out, she reached across the table, picked up The Green Hat, propped it up next to her plate and began to read it with great absorption. Then she looked up. “You have a very progressive library,” she said. “I took the liberty of recommending this exciting book to your daughter. You told me it was your favorite. You sent all the way to New York City on purpose for it, yes?”

  “I don’t—I quite—” said my mother, pushing back her chair from the table. My mother was trembling from head to foot and her face was set in an expression of fixed distaste. Our visitor regarded first my mother and then my father, bending over them tenderly and with exquisite interest. She said:

  “I hope you do not mind my using your library.”

  “No no no,” muttered my father.

  “I eat almost for two,” said our visitor modestly, “because of my height. I hope you do not mind that?”

  “No, of course not,” said my father, regaining control of himself. “Good. It is all considered in the bill,” said the visitor, and looking about at my shrunken parents, each hurried, each spooning in the food and avoiding her gaze, she added deliberately:

  “I took also another liberty. I removed from the endpapers certain—ah—drawings that I did not think bore any relation to the text. You do not mind?”

  And as my father and mother looked in shocked surprise and utter consternation—at each other—she said to me in a low voice, “Don’t eat. You’ll make yourself sick,” and then smiled warmly at the two of them when my mother went off into the kitchen and my father remembered he was late for work. She waved at them. I jumped up as soon as they were out of the room.

  “There was no drawings in that book!” I whispered.

  “Then we must make some,” said she, and taking a pencil off the whatnot, she drew in the endpapers of the book a series of sketches: the heroine sipping a soda in an ice-cream parlor, showing her legs and very chic; in a sloppy bathing suit and big grin, holding up a large fish; driving her Hispano Suiza into a tree only to be catapulted straight up into the air; and in the last sketch landing demure and coy in the arms of the hero, who looked violently surprised. Then she drew a white mouse putting on lipstick, getting married to another white mouse in a church, the two entangled in some manner I thought I should not look at, the lady mouse with a big belly and two little mice inside (who were playing chess), then the little mice coming out in separate envelopes and finally the whole family having a picnic, with some things around the picnic basket that I did not recognize and underneath in capital letters “I did not bring up my children to test cigarettes." This left me blank. She laughed and rubbed it out, saying that it was out of date. Then she drew a white mouse with a rolled-up umbrella chasing my mother. I picked that up and looked at it for a while; then I tore it into pieces, and tore the others into pieces as well. I said, "I don’t think you have the slightest right to—” and stopped. She was looking at me with—not anger exactly—not warning exactly—I found I had to sit down. I began to cry.

  “Ah! The results of practical psychology,” she said dryly, gathering up the pieces of her sketches. She took matches off the whatnot and set fire to the pieces in a saucer. She held up the smoking match between her thumb and forefinger, saying, “You see? The finger is—shall we say, perception?—but the thumb is money. The thumb is hard.”

  “You oughtn’t to treat my parents that way!” I said, crying.

  “You ought not to tear up my sketches,” she said calmly.

  “Why not! Why not!” I shouted.

  “Because they are worth money,” she said, “in some quarters. I won’t draw you any more,” and indifferently taking the saucer with the ashes in it in one palm, she went into the kitchen. I heard her voice and then my mother’s, and then my mother’s again, and then our visitor’s in a tone that would’ve made a rock weep, but I never found out what they said.

  I passed our guest’s room many times at night that summer, going in by the hall past her rented room where the second-floor windows gave out onto the dark garden. The electric lights were always on brilliantly. My mother had sewn the white curtains because she did every thing like that and had bought the furniture at a sale: a marble-topped bureau, the wardrobe, the iron bedstead, an old Victrola against the wall. There was usually an open book on the bed. I wou
ld stand in the shadow of the open doorway and look across the bare wood floor, too much of it and all as slippery as the sea, bare wood waxed and shining in the electric light. A black dress hung on the front of the wardrobe and a pair of shoes like my mother’s, T-strap shoes with thick heels. I used to wonder if she had silver evening slippers inside the wardrobe. Sometimes the open book on the bed was Wells’s The Time Machine and then I would talk to the black glass of the window, I would say to the transparent reflections and the black branches of trees that moved beyond it.

  “I’m only sixteen.”

  “You look eighteen,” she would say.

  “I know,” I would say. “I’d like to be eighteen. I’d like to go away to college. To Radcliffe, I think.”

  She would say nothing, out of surprise.

  “Are you reading Wells?” I would say then, leaning against the doorjamb. “I think that’s funny. Nobody in this town reads anything; they just think about social life. I read a lot, however. I would like to learn a great deal.”

  She would smile then, across the room.

  “I did something funny once,” I would go on. “I mean funny ha-ha, not funny peculiar.” It was a real line, very popular. “I read The Time Machine and then I went around asking people were they Eloi or were they Morlocks; everyone liked it. The point is which you would be if you could, like being an optimist or a pessimist or do you like bobbed hair.” Then I would add, “Which are you?” and she would only shrug and smile a little more. She would prop her chin on one long, long hand and look into my eyes with her black Egyptian eyes and then she would say in her curious hoarse voice: “It is you who must say it first.”

  “I think,” I would say, “that you are a Morlock,” and sitting on the bed in my mother’s rented room with The Time Machine open beside her, she would say: