Alyx - Joanna Russ

by Unknown Author

  It said to her, in the voice of Iris: “You are frozen through and through. You are a detestable woman.”

  She fell back against the snow, dead.

  When the dawn came, bringing a false truce, Alyx was sitting up with her arms clasped about her knees and watching the others wake up. She was again, as before, delicately iced over, on the line between reason and unreason. She thought she would keep it that way. She ate with the others, saying nothing, doing nothing, watching the murky haze in the sky and the spreading thumbprint in it that was the sun. The landscape was geometric and very pleasing. In the middle of the morning they passed a boulder someone or something had put out on the waste: to one side of it was a patch of crushed snow and brown moss showing through. Later in the day the world became more natural, though no less pleasant, and they stopped to eat once more, sitting in the middle of the plain that spread out to nowhere in particular. Iris was leaning over and eating out of one hand, utterly beautiful as were all the others, the six or seven or eight of them, all very beautiful and the scenery too, all of which Alyx explained, and that at very great length.

  “What do you mean!” cried Iris suddenly. “What do you mean you’re going to go along without us, what do you mean by that!”

  “Huh?” said Alyx.

  “And don’t call me names,” said Iris, trembling visibly. “I’ve had enough,”, and she went off and sat by somebody else. What have you had enough of? thought Alyx curiously, but she followed her anyway, to see that she came to no harm. Iris was sitting by one of the nuns. Her face was half turned away and there was a perceptible shadow on it. The nun was saying “Well, I told you.” The shadow on Iris’s face seemed to grow into a skin disease, something puckered or blistered like the lichens on a rock, a very interesting purple shadow; then it contracted into a small patch on her face and looked as if it were about to go out, but finally it turned into something.

  Iris had a black eye.

  “Where’d you get that?” said Alyx, with interest.

  Iris put her hand over her eye.

  “Well, where’d you get it?” said Alyx. “Who gave it to you? Did you fall against a rock?

  “I think you’re making it up,” she added frankly, but the words did not come out quite right. The black eye wavered as if it were going to turn into a skin disease again. “Well?” demanded Alyx. “How’d you get it out here in the middle of the desert? Huh? How did you? Come on!”

  “You gave it to me,” said Iris.

  “Oh, she won’t understand anything!” exclaimed one of the nuns contemptuously. Alyx sat down in the snow and tucked her feet under her. She put her arms around herself. Iris was turning away again, nursing the puffy flesh around her bloodshot eye: it was a purple bruise beginning to turn yellow and a remarkable sight, the focus of the entire plain, which had begun to wheel slowly and majestically around it. However, it looked more like a black eye every moment.

  “Me?” Alyx said finally.

  “In your sleep,’' answered one of the nuns. “You are certainly a practiced woman. I believe you are a bad woman. We have all tried to take the pills away from you and the only issue of it is that Iris has a black eye and Gavrily a sprained wrist. Myself, I wash my hands of it.

  “Of course,” she added with some satisfaction, “it is too late now. Much too late. You have been eating them all along. You can’t stop now; you would die, you know. Metabolic balances.”

  “What, in one night!” said Alyx.

  “No,” said the other. “Five.”

  “I think we are running out of food,” said Iris. “We had better go on.”

  “Come on,” she added, getting up.

  They went on.

  She took command two days later when she had become more habituated to the stuff, and although someone followed them constantly (but out of sight) there were no more hallucinations and her decisions were—on the whole—sensible. She thought the whole thing was a grand joke. When the food disappeared from out of the bottomless bags, she turned them inside out and licked the dust off them, and the others did the same; when she bent down, supporting herself on one arm, and looked over the brown sky for aircraft, the others did the same; and when she held up two fingers against one eye to take the visual diameter of the bleary sun and then moved the two fingers three times to one side—using her other hand as a marker—to find out their way, so did they, though they did not know why. There was no moss, no food, hardly any light, and bad pains in the stomach. Snow held them up for a day when the sun went out altogether. They sat together and did not talk. The next day the sky lifted a little and they went on, still not talking. When the middle of the day came and they had rested a while, they refused to get up; so she had to pummel them and kick them to their feet. She said she saw a thing up ahead that was probably the Pole station; she said they had bad eyes and bad ears and bad minds and could not expect to see it. They went on for the rest of the day and the next morning had to be kicked and cuffed again until they got up, and so they walked slowly on, leaving always the same footprints in the thin snow, a line of footprints behind exactly matching the fresh line in front, added one by one, like a line of stitching. Iris said there was a hobby machine that did that with only a single foot, faster than the eye could follow, over and over again, depositing now a rose, now a face, again a lily, a dragon, a tower, a shield. . . .

  On the fifty-seventh day they reached the Pole station.

  It sprawled over five acres of strangely irregular ground: cut-stone blocks in heaps, stone paths that led nowhere, stone walls that enclosed nothing, a mined city, entirely roofless. Through their binoculars nothing looked taller than any of them. Nothing was moving. They stood staring at it but could make no sense of it. One of the nuns flopped down in the snow. Gavrily said:

  “Someone ought to let them know we’re here.”

  “They know,” said Alyx.

  “They don’t know,” he said.

  “They know,” said Alyx. She was looking through the binoculars. She had her feet planted wide apart in the snow and was fiddling with the focus knob, trying to find something in the rains. Around her the women lay like big dolls. She knew it was the Pole because of the position of the sun; she knew it was not a city and had never been a city but something the lieutenant had long ago called a giant aerial code and she knew that if someone does not come out to greet you, you do not ran to greet him. She said “Stay here,” and hung the binoculars around her neck.

  “No, Agent,” said Gavrily. He was swaying a little on his feet.

  “Stay here,” she repeated, tucking the binoculars inside her suit, and dropping to her knees, she began to crawl forward. Gavrily, smiling, walked past her towards the giant anagram laid out on the snow; smiling, he turned and waved, saying something she could not catch; and resolutely marching forward—because he could talk to people best, she supposed, although he was stumbling a little and his face was gray—he kept on walking in the direction of the Pole station, over the flat plain, until his head was blown off.

  It was done silently and bloodlessly, in a flash of light. Gavrily threw up both arms, stood still, and toppled over. Behind her Alyx heard someone gasp repeatedly, in a fit of hiccoughs. Silence.

  “Iris, give me your pack,” said Alyx.

  “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” said Iris.

  “I want to go away,” said someone else, tiredly.

  Alyx had to kick them to get the packs off them; then she had to push Iris’s face into the snow until the girl stopped grabbing at her; she dragged all four packs over the snow like sleds, and stopping a few feet from Gavrily’s body, she dumped all four onto the ground and pulled Gavrily back by the feet. Marker, she thought. Cursing automatically, she wrenched the packs open and lobbed a few bottles at the town at random. They vanished in a glitter two meters from the ground. She thought for a moment and then rapidly assembled a crossbow; bolts fired from it met the same fate; the crossbow itself, carefully lifted into the air, flared at
the tip and the whole thing became so hot that she had to drop it. Her gloves were charred. Wrapping bandages from one of the packs around the bow, she lifted it again, this time ten paces to one side; again the tip vanished; ten paces to the other side and the same thing happened; crawling forward with her sunglasses on, she held it up in front of her and watched the zone of disappearance move slowly down to the grip. She tried it with another, twenty paces to the left. Twenty paces to the right. Her palms were blistered, the gloves burned off. The thing got closer and closer to the ground; there would be no crawling under it. She retreated to Gavrily’s body and found Iris behind it, holding on to one of the packs to keep herself steady, whispering “What is it, what is it, what is it?”

  “It’s a fence,” said Alyx, thrusting her stinging hands into the snow, “and whoever’s running it doesn’t have the sense to turn it off.”

  “Oh no, it’s a machine,” whispered Iris, laying her head against the pack, “it’s a machine, it’s no use, there’s nobody there.”

  “If there were nobody there,” said Alyx, “I do not think they would need a fence—Iris!” and she began shaking the girl, who seemed to be falling asleep.

  “Doesn’t know anything,” said Iris, barely audible. “Idiots. Doesn’t care.”

  “Iris!” shouted Alyx, slapping her, “Iris!”

  “Only numbers,” said Iris, and passed out. Alyx pulled her over by one shoulder and rubbed snow on her face. She fed her snow and put her forefingers under the girl’s ears, pressing hard into the glands under them. The pain brought the girl around; “Only numbers,” she said again.

  “Iris,” said Alyx, “give me some numbers.”

  “I.D.,” said Iris, “on my back. Microscopic.”

  “Iris,” said Alyx slowly and distinctly, “I cannot read. You must count something out for me. You must count it out while I show those bastards that there is somebody out here. Otherwise we will never get in. We are not supposed to be recognized and we won’t be. We are camouflaged. You must give me some numbers.”

  “Don’t know any,” said Iris. Alyx propped her up against what was left of one of the packs. She dozed off. Alyx brought her out of it again and the girl began to cry, tears going effortlessly down her cheeks, busily one after the other. Then she said “In the Youth Core we had a number.”

  "Yes?” said Alyx.

  “It was the number of our Core and it meant the Jolly Pippin,” said Iris weakly. “It went like this—” and she recited it.

  “I don’t know what those words mean,” said Alyx; “you must show me,” and holding up Iris’s hand, she watched while the girl slowly stuck up fingers: five seven seven, five two, seven five five six. Leaving Iris with her head propped against the pack, Alyx wound everything she could around the base of one of the crossbows, and lifting it upwards slowly spelled out five seven seven, five two, seven five five six, until everything was gone, when she wound another pack around another bow, leaving the first in the snow to cool, and again spelled out the number over and over until she could not move either hand, both hurt so abominably, and Iris had passed out for the second time.

  Then something glittered in the middle of the Pole station and figures in snowsuits came running through the heaps of stone and the incomplete stone walls. Alyx thought dryly It's about time. She turned her head and saw the nuns tottering towards her, she thought suddenly God, how thin! and feeling perfectly well, she got up to wave the nuns on, to urge them to greet the real human beings, the actual living people who had finally come out in response to Iris’s Jolly Pippin. A phrase she had heard sometime during the trip came to her mind: The Old School Yell. She stepped forward smartly and gestured to one of the men, but as he came closer—two others were picking up Iris, she saw, and still others racing towards the nuns—she realized that he had no face, or none to speak of, really, a rather amusing travesty or approximation, that he was, in fact, a machine like the workers she had seen in the sheds when they had first set out on their picnic. Someone had told her then “They’re androids. Don’t nod.” She continued to wave. She turned around for a last look at Paradise and there, only a few meters away, as large as life, stood Machine with his arms crossed over his chest. She said to him “What’s a machine?” but he did not answer. With an air of finality, with the simplicity and severity of a dying god, he pulled over his blue eyes the goggled lenses and snout of another species, rejecting her, rejecting all of them; and tuned in to station Nothing (twenty-four hours a day every day, someone had said) he turned and began to walk away, fading as he walked, walking as he went away, listening to Trivia between the earth and the air until he walked himself right into a cloud, into nothing, into the blue, blue sky.

  Ah, but I feel fine! thought Alyx, and walking forward, smiling as Gavrily had done, she saw under the hood of her android the face of a real man. She collapsed immediately.

  Three weeks later Alyx was saying goodbye to Iris on the Moondrom on Old Earth, a vast idiot dome full of mist and show-lights, with people of all sorts rising and falling on streams of smoke. Iris was going the cheap way to the Moon for a conventional weekend with a strange young man. She was fashionably dressed all in silver, for that was the color that month: silver eyes, silvered eyelids, a cut-out glassene dress with a matching cloak, and her silver luggage and coiffure, both vaguely spherical, bobbing half a meter in the air behind their owner. It would have been less unnerving if the hair had been attached to Iris’s head; as it was, Alyx could not keep her eyes off it.

  Moreover, Iris was having hysterics for the seventh time in the middle of the Moondrom because her old friend who had gone through so much with her, and had taught her to shoot, and had saved her life, would not tell her anything—anything—anything!

  “Can I help it if you refuse to believe me?” said Alyx.

  “Oh, you think I’ll tell him!” snapped Iris scornfully, referring to her escort whom neither of them had yet met. She was searching behind her in the air for something that was apparently supposed to come out of her luggage, but didn’t. Then they sat down, on nothing.

  “Listen, baby,” said Alyx, “just listen. For the thirty-third time, Trans-Temp is not the Great Trans-Temporal Cadre of Heroes and Heroines and don’t shake your head at me because it isn't. It’s a study complex for archaeologists, that’s all it is, and they fish around blindfold in the past, love, just as you would with a bent pin; though they’re very careful where and when they fish because they have an unholy horror of even chipping the bottom off a canoe. They think the world will blow up or something. They stay thirty feet above the top of the sea and twenty feet below it and outside city limits and so on and so on, just about everything you can think of. And they can’t even let through anything that’s alive. Only one day they were fishing in the Bay of Tyre a good forty feet down and they just happened to receive twenty-odd cubic meters of sea-water complete with a small, rather inept Greek thief who had just pinched an expensive chess set from the Prince of Tyre, who between ourselves is no gentleman. They tell me I was attached to a rope attached to knots attached to a rather large boulder with all of us considerably more dead than alive, just dead enough, in fact, to come through at all, and just alive enough to be salvageable. That is, I was. They also tell me that this is one chance in several billion billion so there is only one of me, my dear, only one, and there never will be any more, prehistoric or heroic or unheroic or otherwise, and if you would only please, please oblige your escort by telling—”

  “They’ll send you back!’’ said Iris, clasping her hands with wonderfiil intensity.

  “They can’t,” said Alyx.

  “They’ll cut you up and study you!”

  “They won’t.”

  “They’ll shut you up in a cage and make you teach them things!”

  “They tried,” said Alyx. “The Army—”

  Here Iris jumped up, her mouth open, her face clouded over. She was fingering something behind her ear.

  “I have to go,” she s
aid absently. She smiled a little sadly. “That’s a very good story,” she said.

  “Iris—” began Alyx, getting up.

  “I’ll send you something,” said Iris hastily. “I’ll send you a piece of the Moon; see if I don’t.”

  “The historical sites,” said Alyx. She was about to say something more, something light, but at that moment Iris—snatching frantically in the air behind her for whatever it was that had not come out the first time and showed no signs of doing so the second-burst into passionate tears.

  “How will you manage?” she cried, “oh, how will you, you’re seven years younger than I am, you’re just a baby!” and weeping in a swirl of silver cloak, and hair, and luggage, in a storm of violently crackling sparks that turned gold and silver and ran off the both of them like water, little Iris swooped down, threw her arms around her littler friend, wept some more, and immediately afterward rose rapidly into the air, waving goodbye like mad. Halfway up to the foggy roof she produced what she had apparently been trying to get from her luggage all along: a small silver flag, a jaunty square with which she blew her nose and then proceeded to wave goodbye again, smiling brilliantly. It was a handkerchief.