Alyx - Joanna Russ (16 page)

“I did not know,”
said Alyx.

“I’m—I’m sorry,” he said, “but I never—never thought of it. I didn’t think it would matter.” He looked down at the enormous corpse. “Animals do not attack people,” he said. Even in the dim light she could see his expression; he knew that what he had said was idiotic.

“Oh no,” she said deliberately, “oh no, of course not,” and kneeling beside the corpse she extracted both her knives, cleaned them in the snow and put them back in the sheaths attached to her forearms under the suit. Convenient not to have water rust the blades. She studied the bear’s claws for a few minutes, feeling them and trying as well as she could to see them in the dim light. Then she sent Machine into the cave for Raydos’s artists’ tools, and choosing the small, thin knife that he used to sharpen his pencils (some day, she thought, she would have to ask him what a pencils was) she slashed the animal’s belly and neck, imitating the slash of claws and disguising the wounds made by her knives. She had seen bears fight once, in a circus, and had heard tales of what they did to one another. She hoped the stories had been accurate. With Raydos’s knife she also ripped open one of the animal’s shoulders and attempted to simulate the bite of its teeth, being careful to open a main artery. The damned thing had such a layer of fat that she had trouble getting to it. When cut, the vessel pumped slowly; there was not the pool of blood there should be, but
What the devil,
she thought,
no one may ever find it and if they do, will they be able to tell the difference? Probably not.
They could dig out the bolts tomorrow. She cleaned Raydos’s knife, returned it to Machine and went back to the cave.

No one said a word.

“I have,” said Alyx, “just killed a bear. It was eleven feet high and could have eaten the lot of you. If anyone talks loud again, any time, for any reason, I shall ram his unspeakable teeth down his unspeakable throat.”

Maudey began to mutter, sobbing a little.

“Machine,” she said, “make that woman stop,” and she watched, dead tired, while Machine took something from his pack, pressed it to Maudey’s nose, and laid her gently on the floor. “She’ll sleep,” he said.

“That was not kindly done,” remarked one of the nuns.

Alyx bit her own hand; she bit it hard, leaving marks; she told Machine, Raydos and Gunnar about the watch; she and they brought more snow into the cave to cushion the others, although the wind had half done their job for them. Everyone was quiet. All the same, she put her fingers in her ears but that pushed her hood back and made her head get cold; then she rolled over against the cave wall. Finally she did what she had been doing for the past seventeen nights. She went out into the snow and slept by herself, against the rock wall two meters from the drop, with Machine nearby, dim and comforting in the falling snow. She dreamed of the sun of the Tyrian seas, of clouds and ships and Mediterranean heat—and then of nothing at all.

The next morning when the East—she had decided to call it the East—brightened enough to see by, Alyx ended her watch. It had begun to clear during the night and the sky was showing signs of turning a pale winter blue, very uncomfortable-looking. She woke Gunnar, making the others huddled near him stir and mutter in their sleep, for it had gotten colder, too, during the night, and with Gunnar she sat down in the snow and went over the contents of their two packs, item by item. She figured that what they had in common everyone would have. She made him explain everything: the sun-glasses, the drugs that slowed you down if you were hurt, the bottle Machine had used that was for unconsciousness in cases of pain, the different kinds of dried foods, the binoculars, a bottle of something you put on wounds to make new flesh (it said “nu-flesh” and she tried to memorize the letters on it), the knives, the grooved barrel of the crossbow (but that impressed her greatly), the water containers, the suit-mending tape, fluff you could add to your suit if you lost fluff from it and a coil of extremely thin, extremely strong rope that she measured by solemnly telling it out from her outstretched hand to her nose and so on and so on and so on until she had figured the length. Gunnar seemed to find this very funny. There was also something that she recognized as long underwear (though she did not think she would bring it to anybody’s attention just yet) and at the bottom a packet of something she could not make head or tail of; Gunnar said it was to unfold and clean yourself with.

“Everyone’s used theirs up,” said he, “I’m afraid.”

“A ritual, no doubt,” said she, “in this cold. I told them they’d stink.”

He sat there, wrinkling his brow for a moment, and then he said:

“There are no stimulants and there are no euphorics.”

She asked what those were and he explained. “Ah, a Greek root,” she said. He started to talk about how worried he was that there were no stimulants and no euphorics; these should have been included; they could hardly expect them to finish a weekend without them, let alone a seven-weeks’ trip; in fact, he said, there was something odd about the whole thing. By now Alyx had ambled over to the dead bear and was digging the bolts out of it; she asked him over her shoulder, “Do
they
travel by night or day?”

“They?” he said, puzzled, and then “Oh, them! No, it makes no difference to them.”

“Then it will make no difference to us,” she said, cleaning the bolts in the snow. “Can they follow our tracks at night?”

“Why not?” said he, and she nodded.

“Do you think,” said he, after a moment’s silence, “that they are trying something out on us?”

“They?” she said. “Oh, them! Trans-Temp. Possibly. Quite possibly.”
But probably not,
she added to herself,
unfortunately.
And she packed the bolts neatly away.

“I
think,” said Gunnar, skirting the bear’s carcass where the blood still showed under the trodden snow, “that it is very odd that we have nothing else with us. I’m inclined to—”
(Good Lord, he's nervous,
she thought) “I’m inclined to believe,” he said, settling ponderously in a clean patch of snow and leaning towards her so as to make himself heard, for he was speaking in a low voice, “that this is some kind of experiment. Or carelessness. Criminal carelessness. When we get back—” and he stopped, staring into the snow.

“If we get back,” said Alyx cheerfully, getting to her feet, “you can lodge a complaint or declare a tort, or whatever it is you do. Here,” and she handed him a wad of fluff she had picked out of her pack.

“What I should have done last night,” she said, “half-obliterating our tracks around the carcass so they don’t look so damned human. With luck” (she glanced up) “the snow won’t stop for an hour yet.”

“How can you tell?” said he, his mouth open.

“Because it is still coming down," said Alyx, and she gave him a push in the back. She had to reach up to do it. He bent and the two of them backed away, drawing the wads of fluff across the snow like grooms. It worked, but not well.

“How about those nuns,” said Alyx. “Don’t they have some damned thing or other with them?”

“Oh, you have to be careful!” he said in a whisper. “You have to be careful about
that!”
and with this he worked his way to the mouth of the cave.

The sleepers were coming out.

Waking up by themselves for the first time, they filed out of the cave and stood in a row in the opening staring down at the corpse of the animal they had not even seen the night before. She suspected the story had gotten around.
Twenty hand-spans,
she thought,
of bear.
The nuns started back, making some kind of complicated sign on their foreheads and breasts. Raydos bowed admiringly, half ironically. The two older people were plainly frightened, even though Maudey had begun to crane forward for a better look; suddenly her whole body jerked and she flung out one arm; she would have overbalanced herself and fallen if Gavrily had not caught her. “After-effects,” he said.

“How long do these go on?” said Alyx, a little wearily.

"A couple of days,” he said quickly, holding on to the frightened woman, “only a couple of days. They get better.”

“Then take care of her until they do,” said Alyx, and she was about to add the usual signal for the morning (COME ON!) when a voice somewhere above her head said:

“Agent?”

It was Iris, that great lolloping girl, almost as high as the bear, looking down at her with the unfathomable expression of the very young, twisting and twisting a lock of silver hair that had escaped from her hood. She was really very pretty.

“Agent,” blurted Iris, her eyes big, “will you teach me how to shoot?”

“Yes, my dear,” said Alyx, “indeed I will.”

“Come on!” she bawled then. They came on.

Later in the morning, when she allowed them to stop and eat the soggiest of their protein and dried starch kernels for breakfast, one of the nuns came up to her, squatted gracefully in the snow and made the complicated sign thrice: once on her own forehead, once on her own breast and once in the air between her and the little woman who had shot the bear.

“Violence,” said the nun earnestly, “is deplorable. It is always deplorable. It corrupts love, you see, and love is the expansion of consciousness while violence is the restriction of love so that violence, which restricts love and consciousness, is always bad, as consciousness is always good and the consciousness of the All is the best and only good, and to restrict what may lead to the consciousness of the All is unwise and unkind. Therefore to die is only to merge with the All so that actually violence is not justifiable in the postponing of death, as we must all die, and dying is the final good if it is a dying into the All and not a dying away from it, as in violence.

“But,” she said, “the recognition of consciousness and the value of expression of consciousness go hand in hand; there is no evil in expressing the impulses of the nature of consciousness, so that there can be no evil in action and action is not violence. Action is actually an expansion of the consciousness, as one becomes more aware of one’s particular hue nature and thence slowly more aware of one’s ultimate all-embracing Nature which unites one with the All. Action is therefore a good. It is not, of course, the same thing as the true religion, but some of us go the slow path and some the quick, and who will attain Enlightenment first? Who knows? What is, is, as the sage said: One way is not another. I hope you will attend our services when we return home.”

“Yes,” said Alyx. “Indeed I will.” The tall lady made the sign again, this time on Alyx’s forehead and breast, and went sedately back to her breakfast.

And that,
thought Alyx,
is the damndest way of saying Bravo that I have ever heard!

She decided to teach them all to shoot, including the nuns. It was understood, of course, that the nuns would shoot only bears.

Later in the afternoon, when the snow had stopped and before visibility became bad, she lined all of them up on a relatively level snow-field, assigning the two nuns to Gunnar, Gavrily and Raydos to Machine and herself teaching Iris. Maudey rested, a little dazed from the nervous spasms that had been shaking her all day, though perfectly clear in her mind. Most of them tired of the business after the first hour, except for Raydos, who seemed to enjoy handling the new thing again, and Iris, who kept saying “Just a little more, just a little more; I’m not good enough.” When Machine laughed at her, she loftily explained that it was “rather like dancing.”

“Which you have never done for pleasure, I am sure,” she added.

During the late afternoon they slogged up an ever-narrowing path between cliffs, towards what Gunnar swore was a pass in the mountains. It seemed, however, as if these mountains had no pass but only plateaus; no, not plateaus, only peaks; that even the peaks had no down but only up, and on and on they kept in the red light of the setting winter sun, holding the glare always to the proper side of them, plodding up a steeper and steeper path until the red light turned purple and dim, and died, until each of them saw the other as a dim hulk marching in front of him.

She called a halt. They sat down. For the first time during the whole trip they bunched together, actually touching body to body, with only Maudey a little away from them, for she was still having her trouble. (Alyx had one of the nuns put her to sleep and the spasms stopped instantly.) It was very cold, with the stars splendid, icy points and the whole tumbled waste of jagged rock shining faintly around them. They did not, as they usually did, begin to analyze the events of the day, but only half-sat, half-lay in silence, feeling the still air around them drain away their warmth, which (Iris said) “seemed to flow right up into the sky.” They watched the stars. Then out of nowhere, for no reason at all, Gavrily began to sing in a reedy tenor a few lines of what he called a “baby-song” and this nursery tune—for it was not, Alyx was made to understand, real music—put them all into tears. They sobbed companionably for a little while. It got colder and colder. Gunnar suggested that they pack the snow around them to keep in the heat and Alyx, who had noticed that her buttocks seemed to be the warmest place about her, agreed, so they all built a round wall of snow, with Maudey in the middle of it, and then crawled in around her and pulled the whole thing down on top of them, each packing himself in his own little heap. Then it all had to be disrupted and put right again because the first watch had to climb out. This was Iris. She still seemed very excited, whispering to Alyx “Was I good enough? Will you teach me again?” over and over until somebody poked her and she exclaimed “Ow!” There was yawning, sighing, breathing.

“Will you,” said Iris, bending over the little heap of persons, “teach me again? Will you tell me all about yourself? Will you tell me everything? Will you? Will you?”

“Oh, be quiet,” said Machine crossly, and Iris took her bow and went a little aside, to sit watch.

It was the eighteenth night.

The nineteenth. The twentieth. The twenty-first. They were very quiet. They were idealizing, trusting, companionable, almost happy. It made Alyx nervous, and the more they looked at her, asked her about her and listened to her the more unnerved she became. She did not think they understood what was happening. She told them about her life with one ear on the sounds about them, instantly alert, ready to spring up, with her crossbow always across her knees; so that they asked her what the matter was. She said “Nothing.” She told them legends, fairy tales, religious stories, but they didn’t want to hear those; they wanted to hear about her, what she ate, what she drank, what she wore, what her house was like, whom she knew, all the particulars of the business, the alleyways, the gutters, the finest houses and the worst houses in Tyre. She felt it was all being dragged out of her against her will. They were among the mountains now and going very slowly, very badly; they went far into the night now whenever it was clear and as soon as they settled down for the night (everyone had got into the long underwear one clear and frosty morning, hopping about from one bare foot to another, and discovering wrapped within it what they declared to be artificial arches) they bunched up together against the cold, interlacing arms and legs and squirming together as close as they could, saying: