Alyx - Joanna Russ Read online

  “Look here,” she said, “I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid—”

  “Sorry,” he said, and was gone again, into one of the walls, right into one of the walls.

  “He’s busy,” said Raydos, the flat-color man. “They’re sending someone else through and he’s trying to talk them out of it.”

  “Joy,” said Alyx.

  “Have you noticed,” said Raydos, “how your vocabulary keeps expanding? That’s the effect of hypnotic language training; they can’t give you the whole context consciously, you see, only the sectors where the languages overlap so you keep coming up against these unconscious, ‘buried’ areas where a sudden context triggers off a whole pre-implanted pattern. It’s like packing your frazzle; you always remember where it is when you need it, but of course it’s always at the bottom. You’ll be feeling rather stupid for a few days, but it’ll wear off.”

  “A frazzle?” said Maudey, drifting over. “Why, I imagine she doesn’t even know what a frazzle is.”

  “I told you to cut your hair,” said Alyx.

  “A frazzle,” said Gavrily, “is the greatest invention of the last two centuries, let me assure you. Only in some cities, of course; they have a decibel limit on most. And of course it’s frazzles, one for each ear, they neutralize the sound-waves, you know, absolute silence, although” (he went on and everybody giggled) “I have had them used against me at times!”

  “I would use one against your campaigns all the time,” said Iris, joining them. “See, I cut my hair! Isn’t it fun?” and with a sudden jerk she swung her head down at Alyx to show her short, silver hair, swinging it back and forth and giggling hysterically while Gavrily laughed and tried to catch at it. They were all between two and two-and-a-half meters tall. It was intolerable. They were grabbing at Iris’s hair and explaining to each other about the different frazzles they had used and the sound-baffles of the apartments they had been in, and simulated forests with walls that went tweet-tweet and how utterly lag it was to install free-fall in your bathroom (if only you could afford it) and take a bath in a bubble, though you must be careful not to use too large a bubble or you might suffocate. She dove between them, unnoticed, into the snow where Machine practiced shooting bolts at a target, his eyes hooded in lenses, his ears muffled, his feet never moving. He was on his way to becoming a master. There was a sudden rise in the excited gabble from inside, and turning, Alyx saw someone come out of the far wall with the lieutenant, the first blond person she had seen so far, for everyone except the lieutenant seemed to be some kind of indeterminate, mixed racial type, except for Maudey and Iris, who had what Alyx would have called a dash of the Asiatic. Everyone was a little darker than herself and a little more pronounced in feature, as if they had crossbred in a hundred ways to even out at last, but here came the lieutenant with what Alyx would have called a freak Northman, another giant (she did not give a damn), and then left him inside and came out and sat down on the outside bench.

  “Lieutenant,” said Alyx, “why are you sending me on this picnic?”

  He made a vague gesture, looking back into the shed, fidgeting like a man who has a hundred things to do and cannot make up his mind where to start.

  “An explorer,” said the lieutenant, “amateur. Very famous.”

  “Why don’t you send them with him and stop this nonsense, then!” she exploded.

  “It’s not nonsense,” he said. “Oh, no.”

  “Isn’t it? A ten-day walk over those foothills? No large predators? An enemy that doesn’t give a damn about us? A path a ten-year-old could follow. An explorer right to hand. And how much do I cost?”

  “Agent,” said the lieutenant, “I know civilians,” and he looked back in the shed again, where the newcomer had seized Iris and was kissing her, trying to get his hands inside her suit while Gavrily danced around the couple. Maudey was chatting with Raydos, who made sketches on a pad. “Maybe, Agent,” said the lieutenant, very quietly, “I know how much you cost, and maybe it is very important to get these people out of here before one of them is killed, and maybe, Agent, there is more to it than that when you take people away from their—from their electromagnetic spectrum, shall we say. That man” (and he indicated the blond) “has never been away from a doctor and armor and helpers and vehicles and cameras in his life.” He looked down into the snow. “I shall have to take their drugs away from them,” he said. “They won’t like that. They are going to walk on their own feet for two hundred and forty kilometers. That may be ten days to you but you will see how far you get with them. You cost more than you think, Agent, and let me tell you something else” (here he lifted his face intently) “which may help you to understand, and that is, Agent, that this is the first time the Trans-Temporal Authority—which is a military authority, thanks be for that—has ever transported anyone from the past for any purpose whatsoever. And that was accidental—I can’t explain that now. All this talk about Agents here and Agents there is purely mythological, fictional, you might say, though why people insist on these silly stories I don’t know, for there is only one Agent and that is the first and the last Agent and that, Agent—is you. But don’t try to tell them. They won’t believe you.”

  “Is that why you’re beginning with a picnic?” said Alyx.

  “It will not be a picnic,” he said and he looked at the snow again, at Machine’s tracks, at Machine, who stood patiently sending bolt after bolt into the paint-sprayed target, his eyes and nose and ears shut to the whole human world.

  “What will happen to you?” said Alyx, finally.

  “I?” said the young officer. “Oh, I shall die! but that’s nothing to you,” and he went back into the shed immediately, giving instructions to what Iris had called androids, clapping the giant Northerner on the back, calling Alyx to come in. “This is Gunnar,” he said. They shook hands. It seemed an odd custom to Alyx and apparently to everyone else, for they sniggered. He flashed a smile at everyone as the pack was fitted onto his back. “Here,” he said, holding out a box, “Cannabis,” and Iris, making a face, handed over a crumpled bundle of her green cylinders. “I hope I don’t have to give these up,” said Raydos quietly, stowing his sketchbook into his pack. “They are not power tools, you know,” and he watched dispassionately while Maudey argued for a few minutes, looked a bit sulky and finally produced a tiny, ornate orange cylinder. She took a sniff from it and handed it over to the lieutenant. Iris looked malicious. Gavrily confessed he had nothing. The nuns, of course, said everybody, had nothing and would not carry weapons. Everyone had almost forgotten about them.

  They all straggled out into the snow to where Machine was picking up the last of his bolts. He turned to face them, like a man who would be contaminated by the very air of humankind, nothing showing under the hood of his suit but his mouth and the goggled lenses and snout of another species.

  “I must have that, too,” said Alyx, planting both feet on the ground.

  “Well, after all,” said Maudey, “you can’t expect—”

  “Teach the young fellow a lesson!” said Gavrily.

  “Shall I take it off?” remarked the amateur explorer (And actor, thought Alyx) striding forward, smile flashing while Machine bent slowly for the last of his bolts, fitting it back into the carrying case, not looking at anyone or hearing anything, for all she knew, off on station N-O-T-H-I-N-G twenty-four hours each Earth day, the boy who called himself Machine because he hated the lot of them.

  “If you touch him,” said Alyx evenly, “I shall kill you,” and as they gasped and giggled (Gunnar gave a rueful smile; he had been outplayed) she walked over to him and held out her hand. The boy took off his Trivia and dropped it into the snow; the showing of any face would have been a shock but his was completely denuded of hair, according (she supposed) to the fashion he followed: eyebrows, eyelashes and scalp, and his eyes were a staring, brilliant, shattering, liquescent blue. “You’re a good shot,” she said. He was not interested. He looked at them without the slightest emotion. �
�He hardly ever talks,” said Maudey. They formed a straggling line, walking off toward the low hills and Alyx, a thought suddenly coming to her, said off-handedly before she knew it, “You’re mother and daughter, aren’t you?”

  The entire line stopped. Maudey had instantly turned away, Iris looked furiously angry, Gunnar extremely surprised and only Raydos patiently waited, as usual, watching them all. Machine remained Machine. The nuns were hiding their mouths, shocked, with both hands.

  “I thought—”

  “If you must—”

  “Don’t you ever—!”

  The voices came at her from all sides.

  “Shut up,” she said, “and march. I’ll do worse yet.” The column began again. “Faster,” she said. “You know,” she added cruelly, carefully listening for the effect of her words, “one of you may die.” Behind her there was a stiffening, a gasp, a terrified murmur at such bad, bad taste. “Yes, yes,” she said, hammering it in, “one of us may very well die before this trip is over,” and quickened her pace in the powdery snow, the even, crisp, shallow snow, as easy to walk in as if put down expressly for a pleasure jaunt, a lovely picnic under the beautiful blue heaven of this best of all possible tourist resorts. “Any of us,” she repeated carefully, “any one of us at all,” and all of a sudden she thought Why, that’s true. That's very true. She sighed. “Come on,” she said.

  At first she had trouble keeping up with them; then, as they straggled and loitered, she had no trouble at all; and finally they had trouble keeping up with her. The joking and bantering had stopped. She let them halt fairly early (the lieutenant had started them out—wisely, she thought—late in the afternoon) under an overhanging rock. Mountains so old and smooth should not have many caves and outflung walls where a climbing party can rest, but the mountains of Paradise had them. The late, late shadows were violet blue and the sunlight going up the farthest peaks went up like the sunlight in a children’s book, with a purity and perfection of color changing into color and the snow melting into cobalt evening which Alyx watched with—

  Wonder. Awe. Suspicion. But nobody was about. However, they were making trouble when she got back. They were huddled together, rather irritable, talking insatiably as if they had to make up for their few silent hours in the afternoon’s march. It was ten degrees below freezing and would not drop much lower at this time of year, the lieutenant had promised, even though there might be snow, a fact (she thought) for which they might at least look properly thankful.

  “Well?” she said, and everyone smiled.

  “We’ve been talking,” said Maudey brightly. “About what to do.”

  “What to do what?” said Alyx.

  “What to do next,” said Gavrily, surprised. “What else?”

  The two nuns smiled.

  “We think,” said Maudey, “that we ought to go much more slowly and straight across, you know, and Gunnar wants to take photographs—”

  “Manual,” said the explorer, flashing his teeth.

  “And not through the mountains,” said Maudey. “It’s so up-and-down, you know.”

  “And hard,” said Iris.

  “And we voted,” said Maudey, “and Gunnar won.”

  “Won what?” said Alyx.

  “Well, won,” said Gavrily, “you know.”

  “Won what?” repeated Alyx, a little sharply; they all looked embarrassed, not (she thought, surprised) for themselves but for her. Definitely for her.

  “They want Gunnar to lead them.” No one knew who had spoken. Alyx looked from one to the other but they were as surprised as she; then she whirled around sharply, for it was Machine who had spoken, Machine who had never before said one word. He squatted in the snow, his back against the rock, looking past them. He spoke precisely and without the slightest inflection.

  “Thank you,” said Alyx. “Is that what you all want?”

  “Not I,” said Raydos.

  “I do,” said Maudey.

  “And I do,” said Iris. “I think-”

  “I do,” said Gavrily.

  “We think—” the nuns began.

  She was prepared to blast their ears off, to tell them just what she thought of them. She was shaking all over. She began in her own language, however, and had to switch clumsily into theirs, trying to impress upon them things for which she could not find words, things for which she did not believe the language had words at all: that she was in charge of them, that this was not a pleasure party, that they might die, that it was her job to be responsible for them, and that whoever led them, or how, or why, or in what way, was none of their business. She kept saying it over and over that it was none of their business.

  “Oh, everything is everybody’s business,” said Gavrily cheerfully, as if her feeling that way were quite natural, quite wrong and also completely irrelevant, and they all began to chat again. Gunnar came up to her sympathetically and took hold of her hands. She twisted in his grasp, instinctively beginning a movement that would have ended in the pit of his stomach, but he grasped each of her wrists, saying “No, no, you’re not big enough,” and holding her indulgently away from him with his big, straight, steady arms. He had begun to laugh, saying “I know this kind of thing too, you see!” when she turned in his grip, taking hold of his wrists in the double hold used by certain circus performers, and bearing down sharply on his arms (he kept them steady for just long enough, thinking he was still holding her off) she lifted herself up as if on a gate, swung under his guard and kicked him right under the arch of the ribs. Luckily the suit cushioned the blow a little. The silence that followed—except for his gasping—was complete. They had never, she supposed, seen Gunnar on the ground that way before. Or anyone else. Then Maudey threw up.

  “I am sorry,” said Alyx, ‘‘but I cannot talk to you. You will do as I say,” and she walked away from them and sat down near Machine, whose eyes had never left the snow in front of him, who was making furrows in it with one hand. She sat there, listening to the frightened whispers in back of her, knowing she had behaved badly and wanting to behave even worse all over again, trembling from head to foot with rage, knowing they were only children, cursing herself abominably—and the Trans-Temporal Authority—and her own idiot helplessness and the “commercial war,” whatever that might be, and each one of her charges, individually and collectively, until the last of the unfamiliar stars came out and the sky turned black. She fell asleep in her wonderful insulated suit, as did they all, thinking Oh, God, not even keeping a watch, and not caring; but she woke from time to time to hear their secure breathing, and then the refrain of a poem came to her in the language of Phoenician Tyre, those great traders who had gone even to the gates of Britain for tin, where the savages painted themselves blue and believed stones to be sacred, not having anything else, the poor bastards. The refrain of the poem was What will become of me? which she changed to What will become of them? until she realized that nothing at all would become of them, for they did not have to understand her. But I, she thought, will have to understand them.

  And then, sang the merchants of Tyre, that great city, what, O God, will become of me?

  She had no trouble controlling them the next day; they were much too afraid of her. Gunnar, however, plainly admired her and this made her furious. She was getting into her stride now, over the easy snow, getting used to the pack resting on some queer contraption not on her back but on her hips, as they all did, and finding the snow easy to walk over. The sun of Paradise shone in an impossibly blue sky, which she found upsetting. But the air was good; the air was wonderful. She was getting used to walking. She took to outpacing them, long-legged as they were, and sitting in the snow twenty meters away, cross-legged like a monk, until they caught up, then watching them expressionlessly—like a trail-marker— until they passed her, casting back looks that were far from pleasant; and then repeating the whole thing all over again. After the noon meal she stopped that; it was too cruel. They sat down in the middle of a kind of tilted wasteland—it was the side
of a hill but one’s up-and-down got easily mixed in the mountains—and ate everything in the plastic bags marked Two-B, none of it dried and all of it magnificent; Alyx had never had such food in her life on a trip before: fruits and spicy little buns, things like sausages, curls of candy that sprung round your finger and smelled of ginger, and for drinking, the bags you filled with snow and hung inside your suit to melt. Chilly, but efficient. She ate half of everything and put the rest back, out of habit. With venomous looks, everybody else ate everything. “She’s tinier than we are,” Gunnar said, trying to smooth things over, “and I’m sure there’s more than enough!” Alyx reached inside her suit and scratched one arm. “There may not be enough,” she said, “can’t tell,” and returned the rest to her pack, wondering why you couldn’t trust adults to eat one meal at a time without marking it with something. She could not actually read the numbers. But perhaps it was a custom or a ritual. A primitive ritual, she thought. She was in much better spirits. A primitive ritual, she repeated to herself, practiced through inveterate and age-old superstition. She dearly longed to play with the curly candy again. She suddenly remembered the epigram made one Mediterranean evening by the Prince of Tyre on the palace roof over a game of chess and began spontaneously to tell it to them, with all that had accompanied it: the sails in the bay hanging disembodied and white like the flowers in the royal garden just before the last light goes, the smell of the bay at low tide, not as bad as inlanders think but oddly stimulating, bringing to one’s mind the complex processes of decay and life, the ins and outs of things, the ins and outs of herself who could speak six dialects from the gutter to the palace, and five languages, one of them the old Egyptian; and how she had filched the rather valuable chess set later, for the Tyrians were more than a little ostentatious despite their reputation for tough-mindedness, odd people, the adventurers, the traders, the merchants of the Mediterranean, halfway in their habits between the cumbersome dignities of royal Egypt and the people of Crete, who knew how to live if anyone ever had, decorating their eggshell-thin bowls with sea-creatures made unbelievably graceful or with musicians lying in beds of anemones and singing and playing on the flute. She laughed and quoted the epigram itself, which had been superb, a double pun in two languages, almost a pity to deprive a man like that of a chess set worth—