Alyx - Joanna Russ (17 page)

“Tell us about—”

She told them.

On the twenty-fourth night, when she woke Machine to take the dawn watch, he said to her “Do you want to climb it?”

“Climb what?” muttered Alyx. She was chilled and uncomfortable, stirring around to get her blood up.

“Do you want to climb it?” said Machine patiently.

“Wait a minute,” she said, “let me think.” Then she said “You’d better not use slang; I don’t think I’m programmed for it.” He translated. He added—off-handedly—“You don’t have to worry about pregnancy; Trans-Temp’s taken care of it. Or they will, when we get back.”

“Well, no,” said Alyx. “No, I don’t think I do want to—climb it.” He looked, as far as she could tell in the dim light, a little surprised; but he did not touch her, he did not ask again or laugh or stir or even move. He sat with his arms around his knees as if considering something and then he said “All right.” He repeated it decisively , staring at her with eyes that were just beginning to turn blue with the dawn; then he smiled, pulled back the spring on his crossbow and got to his feet.

“And keep your eyes open,” she said, on her way back to the snow-heaped nest of the others.

“Don’t I always?” he said, and as she turned away she heard an unmistakable sound. He had laughed.

The next day Raydos started to sketch her at every halt. He took out his materials and worked swiftly but easily, like a man who thinks himself safe. It was intolerable. She told him that if anything happened or anyone came he would either have to drop his sketchbook or put it in his pack; that if he took the time to put it into his pack he might die or betray the lot of them and that if he dropped it, someone might find it.

“They won’t know what it is,” he said. “It’s archaic, you see.”

“They’ll know it’s not an animal,” she said. “Put it away.”

He went on sketching. She walked over to him, took the book of papers and the length of black thing he was using away from him and stowed them away in her own pack. He smiled and blinked in the sunlight. The thing was not real charcoal or gum or even chalky; she considered asking him about it and then she shuddered. She stood there for a moment, shading her eyes against the sun and being frightened, as if she had to be frightened for the whole crew of them as well as herself, as if she were alone, more alone than by herself, and the more they liked her, the more they obeyed, the more they talked of “when we get back,” the more frightened she would have to become.

“All right, come on,” she heard herself say.

“All right, come on.

“Come on!”

Time after time after time.

On the twenty-ninth afternoon Maudey died. She died suddenly and by accident. They were into the pass that Gunnar had spoken of, half blinded by the glare of ice on the rock walls to either side, following a path that dropped almost sheer from the left. It was wide enough for two or three and Machine had charge of Maudey that day; for although her nervous fits had grown less frequent, they had never entirely gone away. He walked on the outside, she on the inside. Behind them Iris was humming softly to herself. It was icy in parts and the going was slow. They stopped for a moment and Machine cautiously let go of Maudey’s arm; at the same time Iris began to sing softly, the same drab tune over and over again, the way she had said to Alyx they danced at the drug palaces, over and over to put themselves into trances, over and over.

“Stop that filthy song,” said Maudey. “I’m tired.”

Iris continued insultingly to sing.

“I’m tired!” said Maudey desperately, “I’m tired! I’m tired!” and in turning she slipped and fell on the slippery path to her knees. She was still in balance, however. Iris had arched her eyebrows and was silently mouthing something when Machine, who had been watching Maudey intently, bent down to take hold of her, but at that instant Maudey’s whole right arm threw itself out over nothing and she fell over the side of the path. Machine flung himself after her and was only stopped from falling over in his turn by fetching up against someone’s foot—it happened to be one of the nuns—and they both went down, teetering for a moment over the side. The nun was sprawled on the path in a patch of gravel and Machine hung shoulders down over the verge. They pulled him back and got the other one to her feet.

“Well, what happened?” said Iris in surprise. Alyx had grabbed Gunnar by the arm. Iris shrugged at them all elaborately and sat down, her chin on her knees, while Alyx got the rope from all the packs as swiftly as possible, knotted it, pushed the nun off the patch of dry gravel and set Machine on it. “Can you hold him?” she said. Machine nodded. She looped the rope about a projecting point in the wall above them and gave it to Machine; the other end she knotted under Gunnar’s arms. They sent him down to bring Maudey up, which he did, and they laid her down on the path. She was dead.

“Well, how is she?” said Iris, looking at them all over her shoulder.

“She’s dead,” said Alyx.

“That,” said Iris brightly, “is not the right answer,” and she came over to inspect things for herself, coquettishly twisting and untwisting a lock of her straight silver hair. She knelt by the body. Maudey’s head lay almost flat against her shoulder for her neck was broken; her eyes were wide open. Alyx closed them, saying again “little girl, she’s dead.” Iris looked away, then up at them, then down again. She made a careless face. She said “Mo-Maudey was old, you know; d’you think they can fix her when we get back?”

“She is dead,” said Alyx. Iris was drawing lines in the snow. She shrugged and looked covertly at the body, then she turned to it and her face began to change; she moved nearer on her knees. “Mo—Mother,” she said, then grabbed at the woman with the funny, twisted neck, screaming the word “Mother” over and over, grabbing at the clothing and the limbs and even the purple hair where the hood had fallen back, screaming without stopping. Machine said quickly, “I can put her out.” Alyx shook her head. She put one hand over Iris’s mouth to muffle the noise. She sat with the great big girl as Iris threw herself on top of dead Maudey, trying to burrow into her, her screaming turning to sobbing, great gasping sobs that seemed to dislocate her whole body, just as vanity and age had thrown her mother about so terribly between them and had finally thrown her over a cliff. As soon as the girl began to cry, Alyx put both arms about her and rocked with her, back and forth. One of the nuns came up with a thing in her hand, a white pill.

“It would be unkind,” said the nun, “it would be most unkind, most unkind—”

“Go to hell,” said Alyx in Greek.

“I must insist,” said the nun softly, “I must, must insist,” in a tangle of hisses like a snake. “I must, must, I must—”

“Get out!” shouted Alyx to the startled woman, who did not even understand the words. With her arms around Iris, big as Iris was, with little Iris in agonies, Alyx talked to her in Greek, soothed her in Greek, talked just to be talking, rocked her back and forth. Finally there came a moment when Iris stopped.

Everyone looked very surprised.

“Your mother,” said Alyx, carefully pointing to the body, “is dead.” This provoked a fresh outburst. Three more times. Four times. Alyx said it again. For several hours she repeated the whole thing, she did not know how often, holding the girl each time, then holding only her hand, then finally drawing her to her feet and away from the dead woman while the men took the food and equipment out of Maudey’s pack to divide it among themselves and threw the body over the path, to hide it. There was a kind of tittering, whispering chatter behind Alyx. She walked all day with the girl, talking to her, arm clumsily about her, making her walk while she shook with fits of weeping, making her walk when she wanted to sit down, making her walk as she talked of her mother, of running away from home—“not like you did” said Iris—of hating her, loving her, hating her, being reasonable, being rational, being grown up, fighting (“but it’s natural!”), not being able to stand her, being able to stand her, loving her, always fighting with her (and here a fresh fit of weeping) and then—then—

“I killed her!” cried Iris, stock-still on the path. “Oh my God, I killed her! I! I!”

“Bullshit,” said Alyx shortly, her hypnotic vocabulary coming to the rescue at the eleventh instant.

“But I did, I did,” said Iris. “Didn’t you see? I upset her, I made—”

“Ass!” said Alyx.

“Then why didn’t you rope them together,” cried Iris, planting herself hysterically in front of Alyx, arms akimbo, “why didn’t you? You knew she could fall! You wanted to kill her!”

“If you say that again—” said Alyx, getting ready.

“I see it, I see it,” whispered Iris wildly, putting her arms around herself, her eyes narrowing. “Yesss, you wanted her dead—you didn’t want the
trouble
—”

Alyx hit her across the face. She threw her down, sat on her and proceeded to pound at her while the others watched, shocked and scandalized. She took good care not to hurt her. When Iris had stopped, she rubbed snow roughly over the girl’s face and hauled her to her feet, “and no more trouble out of you!” she said.

“I’m all right,” said Iris uncertainly. She took a step. “Yes,” she said. Alyx did not hold her any more but walked next to her, giving her a slight touch now and then when she seemed to waver.

“Yes, I am all right,” said Iris. Then she added, in her normal voice, “I know Maudey is dead.”

“Yes,” said Alyx.

“I know,” said Iris, her voice wobbling a little, “that you didn’t put them together because they both would have gone over.”

She added, “I am going to cry.”

“Cry away,” said Alyx, and the rest of the afternoon Iris marched steadily ahead, weeping silently, trying to mop her face and her nose with the cleaning cloth Alyx had given her, breaking out now and again into suppressed, racking sobs. They camped for the night in a kind of hollow between two rising slopes with Iris jammed securely into the middle of everybody and Alyx next to her. In the dim never-dark of the snow fields, long after everyone else had fallen asleep, someone brushed Alyx across the face, an oddly unctuous sort of touch, at once gentle and unpleasant. She knew at once who it was.

“If you do not,” she said, “take that devil’s stuff out of here
at once—!”
The hand withdrew.

“I must insist,” said the familiar whisper, “I must, must insist. You do not understand—it is not—”

“If you touch her,” said Alyx between her teeth, “I will kill you—both of you—and I will take those little pills you are so fond of and defecate upon each and every one of them, upon my soul I swear that I will!”

“But—but—” She could feel the woman trembling with shock. “If you so much as touch her,” said Alyx, “you will have caused me to commit two murders and a sacrilege. Now get out!” and she got up in the dim light, pulled the pack off every grunting, protesting sleeper’s back—except the two women who had withdrawn to a little distance together—and piled them like a barricade around Iris, who was sleeping with her face to the stars and her mouth open.
Let them trip over that,
she thought vindictively.

Damn it! Damn them all! Boots without spikes, damn them! What do they expect us to do, swim over the mountains?
She did not sleep for a long time, and when she did it seemed that everyone was climbing over her, stepping on top of her and sliding off just for fun. She dreamed she was what Gunnar had described as a ski-slide. Then she dreamed that the first stepped on to her back and then the second on to his and so on and so on until they formed a human ladder, when the whole snow-field slowly tilted upside down. Everyone fell off. She came to with a start; it was Gavrily, waking her for the dawn watch. She saw him fall asleep in seconds, then trudged a little aside and sat cross-legged, her bow on her knees. The two nuns had moved, back to the group, asleep, sprawled out and breathing softly with the others. She watched the sky lighten to the left, become transparent, take on color. Pale blue. Winter blue.

“All right,” she said, “everyone up!” and slipped off her pack for the usual handfuls of breakfast food.

The first thing she noticed, with exasperation, was that Raydos had stolen back his art equipment, for it was gone. The second was that there were only six figures sitting up and munching out of their cupped hands, not seven; she thought
that's right, Maudey's dead,
then ran them over in her head:
Gunnar, Gavrily, Raydos, Machine, the Twins, Iris—

But Iris was missing.

Her first thought was that the girl had somehow been spirited away, or made to disappear by The Holy Twins, who had stopped eating with their hands halfway to their mouths, like people about to pour a sacrifice of grain on to the ground for Mother Earth. Both of them were watching her. Her second thought was unprintable and almost—but not quite—unspeakable, and so instantaneous that she had leapt into the circle of breakfasters before she half knew where she was, shoving their packs and themselves out of her way. She dislodged one of Raydos’s eye lenses; he clapped his hand to his eye and began to grope in the snow. “What the devil—!” said Gunnar.

Iris was lying on her back among the packs, looking up into the sky. She had shut one eye and the other was moving up and down in a regular pattern. Alyx fell over her. When she scrambled to her knees, Iris had not moved and her one open eye still made the regular transit of nothing, up and down, up and down.

“Iris,” said Alyx.

“Byootiful,” said Iris. Alyx shook her. “Byootiful,” crooned the girl, “all byootiful” and very slowly she opened her closed eye, shut the other and began again to scan the something or nothing up in the sky, up and down, up and down. Alyx tried to pull the big girl to her feet, but she was too heavy; then with astonishing lightness Iris herself sat up, put her head to one side and looked at Alyx with absolute calm and complete relaxation. It seemed to Alyx that the touch of one finger would send her down on her back again. “Mother,” said Iris clearly, opening both eyes, “mother. Too lovely,” and she continued to look at Alyx as she had at the sky. She bent her head down on to one shoulder, as Maudey’s head had been bent in death with a broken neck.