Alyx - Joanna Russ (12 page)

“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—

Nobody was listening. She turned around and stared at them. For a moment she could not think, only smell and stare, and then something shifted abruptly inside her head and she could name them again: Gunnar, Machine, Raydos, Maudey, Iris, Gavrily, the two nuns. She had been talking in her own language. They shambled along, leaning forward against the pull of the hip-packs, ploughing up the snow in their exhaustion, these huge, soft people to whom one could not say anything of any consequence. Their faces were drawn with fatigue. She motioned them to stop and they toppled down into the snow without a word, Iris’s cheek right in the cold stuff itself and the two nuns collapsed across each other in a criss-cross. They had worn, she believed, a symbol on a chain around their necks something like the symbol... but she did not want to fall back into her own speech again. She felt extremely stupid. “I am sorry that you’re tired,” she said.

“No, no,” muttered Gunnar, his legs straight out in the snow, staring ahead.

“We’ll take a break,” she said, wondering where the phrase had come from all of a sudden. The sun was hardly halfway down in the sky. She let them rest for an hour or more until they began to talk; then she forced them to their feet and began it all again, the nightmare of stumbling, slipping, sliding, the unmistakable agonies of plodding along with cramped legs and a drained body, the endless pull of the weight at one’s back. . . . She remembered what the lieutenant had said about people deprived of their electromagnetic spectrum. Long before nightfall she stopped them and let them revive while she scouted around for animal tracks—or human tracks—or anything—but found nothing. Paradise was a winter sportsman’s—well, paradise. She asked about animals, but nobody knew for certain or nobody was telling, although Gunnar volunteered the information that Paradise had not been extensively mapped. Maudey complained of a headache. They ate again, this time from a bag marked Two-C, still with nothing dried
(Why carry all that weight in water?
Alyx thought, remembering how the desert people would ride for weeks on nothing but ground wheat), stowed empty, deflated Two-C into their packs and lay down—right in the middle of a vast, empty snow-field. It gave them all the chills. Alyx lay a little apart, to let them talk about her as she was sure they would, and then crept closer. They were talking about her. She made a face and retreated again. A little later she got them up and into the hills above until at sunset it looked as if they would have to sleep in the open. She left them huddled together and went looking about for a cave, but found nothing, until, coming around the path at the edge of a rather sharp drop, she met Machine coming the other way.