Alyx - Joanna Russ (11 page)

“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.

“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.