Alyx - Joanna Russ Read online

  Make the world? You hadn’t the imagination. You didn’t even make these machines; that shiny finish is for customers, not craftsmen, and controls that work by little pictures are for children. You are a child yourself, a child and a horror, and I would ten times rather be subject to your machinery than master of it.

  Aloud she said:

  “Never confuse the weapon and the arm,” and taking the candle, she went away and left him in the dark.

  She got home at dawn and, as her man lay asleep in bed, it seemed to her that he was made out of the light of the dawn that streamed through his fingers and his hair, irradiating him with gold. She kissed him and he opened his eyes.

  “You’ve come home,” he said.

  “So I have,” said she.

  “I fought all night,” she added, “with the Old Man of the Mountain,” for you must know that this demon is a legend in Ourdh; he is the god of this world who dwells in a cave containing the whole world in little, and from his cave he rules the fates of men.

  “Who won?” said her husband, laughing, for in the sunrise when everything is suffused with light it is difficult to see the seriousness of injuries.

  “I did!” said she. “The man is dead.” She smiled, splitting open the wound on her cheek, which began to bleed afresh. “He died,” she said, “for two reasons only: because he was a fool. And because we are not.”

  She added, “I’ll tell you all about it.”

  But that’s another story.

  Picnic on Paradise

  She was a soft-spoken, dark-haired, small-boned woman, not even coming up to their shoulders, like a kind of dwarf or miniature—but that was normal enough for a Mediterranean Greek of nearly four millennia ago, before super-diets and hybridization from seventy colonized planets had turned all humanity (so she had been told) into Scandinavian giants. The young lieutenant, who was two meters and a third tall, or three heads more than herself, very handsome and ebony-skinned, said “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I cannot believe you’re the proper Trans-Temporal Agent; I think—” and he finished his thought on the floor, his head under one of his ankles and this slight young woman (or was she young? Trans-Temp did such strange things sometimes!) somehow holding him down in a position he could not get out of without hurting himself to excruciation. She let him go. She sat down on the balloon-inflated thing they provided for sitting on in these strange times, looking curiously at the super-men and super-women, and said, “I am the Agent. My name is Alyx,” and smiled. She was in a rather good humor. It still amused her to watch this whole place, the transparent columns the women wore instead of clothing, the parts of the walls that pulsated in and out and changed color, the strange floor that waved like grass, the three-dimensional vortices that kept springing to life on what would have been the ceiling if it had only stayed in one place (but it never did) and the general air of unhappy, dogged, insistent, sad restlessness. “A little bit of home,” the lieutenant had called it. He had seemed to find particular cause for nostalgia in a lime-green coil that sprang out of the floor whenever anybody dropped anything, to eat it up, but it was “not in proper order” and sometimes you had to fight it for something you wanted to keep. The people moved her a little closer to laughter. One of them leaned toward her now.

  “Pardon me,” said this one effusively—it was one of the ladies— “but is that face yours? I’ve heard Trans-Temp does all sorts of cosmetic work and I thought they might—”

  “Why yes,” said Alyx, hoping against hope to be impolite. “Are those breasts yours? I can’t help noticing—”

  “Not at all!” cried the lady happily. “Aren’t they wonderful? They’re Adrian’s. I mean they’re by Adrian.”

  “I think that’s enough,” said the lieutenant.

  “Only we rather wondered,” said the lady, elevating her indigo brows at what she seemed to have taken as an insult, “why you keep yourself so covered up. Is it a tribal rite? Are you deformed? Why don’t you get cosmetic treatment; you could have asked for it, you know, I mean I think you could—” but here everybody went pale and turned aside, just as if she had finally managed to do something offensive and All I did, she thought, was take off my shift.

  One of the nuns fell to praying.

  “All right, Agent,” said the lieutenant, his voice a bare whisper, “we believe you. Please put on your clothes.

  “Please, Agent,” he said again, as if his voice were failing him, but she did not move, only sat naked and cross-legged with the old scars on her ribs and belly showing in a perfectly natural and expectable way, sat and looked at them one by one: the two nuns, the lady, the young girl with her mouth hanging open and the iridescent beads wound through three feet of hair, the bald-headed boy with some contraption strapped down over his ears, eyes and nose, the artist and the middle-aged political man, whose right cheek had begun to jump. The artist was leaning forward with his hand cupped under one eye in the old-fashioned and nearly unbelievable pose of someone who has just misplaced a contact lens. He blinked and looked up at her through a flood of mechanical tears.

  “The lieutenant,” he said, coughing a little, “is thinking of anaesthetics and the lady of surgery—I really think you had better put your clothes back on, by the way—and as to what the others think I’m not so sure. I myself have only had my usual trouble with these damned things and I don’t really mind—”

  “Please, Agent,” said the young officer.

  “But I don’t think,” said the artist, massaging one eye, “that you quite understand the effect you’re creating.”

  “None of you has anything on,” said Alyx.

  “You have on your history,” said the artist, “and we’re not used to that, believe me. Not to history. Not to old she-wolves with livid marks running up their ribs and arms, and not to the idea of fights in which people are neither painlessly killed nor painlessly fixed up but linger on and die—slowly—or heal—slowly.

  “Well!” he added, in a very curious tone of voice, “after all, we may all look like that before this is over."

  “Buddha, no!” gasped a nun.

  Alyx put her clothes on, tying the black belt around the black dress. “You may not look as bad,” she said a bit sourly. “But you will certainly smell worse.

  “And I,” she added conversationally, “don’t like pieces of plastic in people’s teeth. I think it disgusting.”

  “Refined sugar,” said the officer, “one of our minor vices,” and then, with an amazed expression, he burst into tears.

  “Well, well,” muttered the young girl, “we’d better get on with it.”

  “Yes,” said the middle-aged man, laughing nervously, “‘People for Every Need,’ you know,” and before he could be thoroughly rebuked for quoting the blazon of the Trans-Temporal Military Authority (Alyx heard the older woman begin lecturing him on the nastiness of calling anyone even by insinuation a thing, an agency, a means or an instrument, anything but a People, or as she said “a People People”) he began to lead the file toward the door, with the girl coming next, a green tube in the middle of her mouth, the two nuns clinging together in shock, the bald-headed boy swaying a little as he walked, as if to unheard music, the lieutenant and the artist—who lingered.

  “Where’d they pick you up?” he said, blinking again and fingering one eye.

  “Off Tyre,” said Alyx. “Where’d they pick you up?”

  “We,” said the artist, “are rich tourists. Can you believe it? Or refugees, rather. Caught up in a local war. A war on the surface of a planet, mind you; I don’t believe I’ve heard of that in my lifetime.”

  “I have,” said Alyx, “quite a few times,” and with the lightest of light pushes she guided him toward the thing that passed for a decent door; the kind of thing she had run through, roaring with laughter, time after time at her first day at Trans-Temp, just for the pleasure of seeing it open up like a giant mouth and then pucker shut in an enormous expression of disgust.

  “Babies!” she said.<
br />
  “By the way,” called back the artist, “I’m a flat-color man. What was your profession?”

  “Murderer,” said Alyx, and she stepped through the door.

  * * *

  “Raydos is the flat-color man,” said the lieutenant, his feet up on what looked gratifyingly like a table. “Used to do wraparounds and walk-ins—very good walk-ins, too, I have a little education in that line myself—but he’s gone wild about something called pigment on flats. Says the other stuff’s too easy.”

  “Flats whats?” said Alyx.

  “I don’t know, any flat surface, I suppose,” said the lieutenant. “And he’s got those machines in his eyes which keep coming out, but he won’t get retinotherapy. Says he likes having two kinds of vision. Most of us are born myopic nowadays, you know.”

  “I wasn’t,” said Alyx.

  “Iris,” the lieutenant went on, palming something and then holding it to his ear, “is pretty typical, though: young, pretty stable, ditto the older woman—oh yes, her name’s Maudey—and Gavrily’s a conamon, of course.”

  “Conamon?” said Alyx, with some difficulty.

  “Influence,” said the lieutenant, his face darkening a little. “Influence, you know. I don’t like the man. That’s too personal an evaluation, of course, but damn it, I’m a decent man. If I don’t like him, I say I don’t like him. He’d honor me for it.”

  “Wouldn’t he kick your teeth in?” said Alyx.

  “How much did they teach you at Trans-Temp?” said the lieutenant, after a pause.

  “Not much,” said Alyx.

  “Well, anyway,” said the lieutenant, a little desperately, “you’ve got Gavrily and he’s a conamon, then Maudey—the one with the blue eyebrows, you know—”

  “Dyed?” asked Alyx politely.

  “Of course. Permanently. And the wienie—”

  “Well, well!” said Alyx.

  “You know,” said the lieutenant, with sarcastic restraint, “you can’t drink that stuff like wine. It’s distilled. Do you know what distilled means?”

  “Yes,” said Alyx. “I found out the hard way.”

  “All right,” said the lieutenant, jumping to his feet, “all right! A wienie is a wienie. He’s the one with the bald head. He calls himself Machine because he’s an idiotic adolescent rebel and he wears that—that Trivia on his head to give himself twenty-four hours a day of solid nirvana, station NOTHING, turns off all stimuli when you want it to, operates psionically. We call it a Trivia because that’s what it is and because forty years ago it was a Tri-V and I despise bald young inexistential rebels who refuse to relate!”

  “Well, well,” she said again.

  “And the nuns,” he said, “are nuns, whatever that means to you. It means nothing to me; I am not a religious man. You have got to get them from here to there, ‘across the border’ as they used to say, because they had money and they came to see Paradise and Paradise turned into—” He stopped and turned to her.

  “You know all this,” he said accusingly.

  She shook her head.

  “Trans-Temp—”

  “Told me nothing.”

  “Well,” said the lieutenant, “perhaps it’s best. Perhaps it’s best. What we need is a person who knows nothing. Perhaps that’s exactly what we need.”

  “Shall I go home?” said Alyx.

  “Wait,” he said harshly, “and don’t joke with me. Paradise is the world you’re on. It’s in the middle of a commercial war. I said commercial war; I’m military and I have nothing to do here except get killed trying to make sure the civilians are out of the way. That’s what you’re for. You get them” (he pressed something in the wall and it turned into a map; she recognized it instantly, even though there were no sea-monsters and no four winds puffing at the corners, which was rather a loss) “from here to here,” he said. “B is a neutral base. They can get you off-planet.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No, that’s not all. Listen to me. If you want to exterminate a world, you blanket it with hell-bombs and for the next few weeks you’ve got a beautiful incandescent disk in the sky, very ornamental and very dead, and that’s that. And if you want to strip-mine, you use something a little less deadly and four weeks later you go down in heavy shielding and dig up any damn thing you like, and that’s that. And if you want to colonize, we have something that kills every form of animal and plant life on the planet and then you go down and cart off the local flora and fauna if they’re poisonous or use them as mulch if they’re usable. But you can’t do any of that on Paradise.”

  She took another drink. She was not drunk.

  “There is,” he said, “every reason not to exterminate Paradise. There is every reason to keep her just as she is. The air and the gravity are near perfect, but you can’t farm Paradise.”

  “Why not?” said Alyx.

  “Why not?” said he. “Because it’s all up and down and nothing, that’s why. It’s glaciers and mountains and coral reefs; it’s rainbows of inedible fish in continental slopes; it’s deserts, cacti, waterfalls going nowhere, rivers that end in lakes of mud and skies—and sunsets—and that’s all it is. That’s all.” He sat down.

  “Paradise,” he said, “is impossible to colonize, but it’s still too valuable to mess up. It’s too beautiful.” He took a deep breath. "It happens,” he said, “to be a tourist resort.”

  Alyx began to giggle. She put her hand in front of her mouth but only giggled the more; then she let go and hoorawed, snorting derisively, bellowing, weeping with laughter.

  “That,” said the lieutenant stiffly, “is pretty ghastly.” She said she was sorry.

  “I don’t know,” he said, rising formally, “just what they are going to fight this war with. Sound on the buildings, probably; they’re not worth much; and for the people every nasty form of explosive or neuronic hand-weapon that’s ever been devised. But no radiation. No viruses. No heat. Nothing to mess up the landscape or the ecological balance. Only they’ve got a net stretched around the planet that monitors everything up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. Automatically, each millisecond. If you went out in those mountains, young woman, and merely sharpened your knife on a rock, the sparks would bring a radio homer in on you in fifteen seconds. No, less.”

  “Thank you for telling me,” said she, elevating her eyebrows. “No fires,” he said, “no weapons, no transportation, no automatic heating, no food processing, nothing airborne. They’ll have some infrared from you but they’ll probably think you’re local wildlife. But by the way, if you hear anything or see anything overhead, we think the best thing for all of you would be to get down on all fours and pretend to be yaks. I’m not fooling.”

  “Poseidon!” said she, under her breath.

  “Oh, one other thing,” he said. “We can’t have induction currents, you know. Might happen. You’ll have to give up everything metal. The knife, please.”

  She handed it over, thinking If I don't get that back— “Trans-Temp sent a synthetic substitute, of course,” the lieutenant went on briskly. “And crossbows—same stuff—and packs, and we’ll give you all the irradiated food we can get you. And insulated suits.”

  “And ignorance,” said she. His eyebrows went up.

  “Sheer ignorance,” she repeated. “The most valuable commodity of all. Me. No familiarity with mechanical transportation or the whatchamacallits. Stupid. Can’t read. Used to walking. Never used a compass in my life. Right?”

  “Your skill—” he began.

  From each of her low sandals she drew out what had looked like part of the ornamentation and flipped both knives expertly at the map on the wall—both hands, simultaneously—striking precisely at point A and point B.

  “You can have those, too,” she said.

  The lieutenant bowed. He pressed the wall again. The knives hung in a cloudy swirl, then in nothing, clear as air, while outside appeared the frosty blue sky, the snowy foothills drawing up to the long, easy swelling crests of Paradise’
s oldest mountain chain—old and easy, not like some of the others, and most unluckily, only two thousand meters high.

  “By God!” said Alyx, fascinated, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen snow before.”

  There was a sound behind her, and she turned. The lieutenant had fainted.

  They weren’t right. She had palmed them a hundred times, flipped them, tested their balance, and they weren’t right. Her aim was off. They felt soapy. She complained to the lieutenant, who said you couldn’t expect exactly the same densities in synthetics, and sat shivering in her insulated suit in the shed, nodding now and again at the workers assembling their packs, while the lieutenant appeared and disappeared into the walls, a little frantically. “Those are just androids,” said Iris good-humoredly. “Don’t nod to them. Don’t you think it’s fun?"

  “Go cut your hair,” said Alyx.

  Iris’s eyes widened.

  “And tell that other woman to do the same,” Alyx added.

  “Zap!” said Iris cryptically, and ambled off. It was detestably chilly. The crossbows impressed her, but she had had no time to practice with them (Which will be remedied by every one of you bastards, she thought) and no time to get used to the cold, which all the rest of them seemed to like. She felt stupid. She began to wonder about something and tried to catch the lieutenant by the arm, cursing herself in her own language, trying to think in her own language and failing, giving up on the knives and finally herding everyone outside into the snow to practice with the crossbows. The wienie was surprisingly good. He stayed at it two hours after the others drifted off, repeating and repeating; Iris came back with her cut hair hanging around her face and confided that she had been named after part of a camera; the lieutenant’s hands began to shake a little on each appearance; and Machine became a dead shot. She stared at him. All the time he had kept the thing he wore on his head clamped over ears and eyes and nose. “He can see through it if he wants to,” said Iris. Maudey was talking earnestly in a corner with Gavrily, the middle-aged politician, and the whole thing was taking on the air of a picnic. Alyx grew exasperated. She pinched a nerve in the lieutenant’s arm the next time he darted across the shed and stopped him, he going “aaah!” and rubbing his arm; he said, “I’m very sorry, but—” She did it again.