Alyx - Joanna Russ (25 page)

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 said 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.

Send me a piece of the Moon,
said Alyx silently,
send me something I can keep,
and turning away she started out between the walls of the Moondrom, which are walls that one cannot see, through the cave that looks like an enormous sea of fog; and if you forget that it was made for civilized beings, it begins to look, once you have lost your way, like an endless cave, an endless fog, through which you will wander forever.

But of course she found her way out, finally.

At the exit—and it was the right exit, the one with billowing smoke that shone ten thousand colors from the lights in the floor and gave you, as you crossed it, the faint, unpleasant sensation of being turned slowly upside down, there where ladies’ cloaks billowed and transparent clothing seemed to dissolve in streams of fire—

Stood Machine. Her heart stopped for a moment, automatically. The fifth or sixth time that day, she estimated.

“God save you, mister,” she said.

He did not move.

“They tell me you’ll be gone in a few weeks,” she said. “I’ll be sorry.”

He said nothing.

“They also tell me,” she went on, “that I am going to teach my special and peculiar skills in a special and peculiar little school, for they seem to think our pilgrimage a success, despite its being full of their own inexcusable blunders, and they also seem to think that my special and peculiar skills are detachable from my special and peculiar attitudes. Like Iris’s hair. I think they will find they are wrong.”

He began to dissolve.

“Raydos is blind,” she said, “stone blind, did you know that? Some kind of immune reaction; when you ask them, they pull a long face and say that medicine can’t be expected to do everything. A foolproof world and full of fools. And then they tape wires on my head and ask me how it feels to be away from home; and they shake their heads when I tell them that I am not away from home; and then they laugh a little—just a little—when I tell them that I have never had a home.

“And then,” she said, “I tell them that you are dead.”

He disappeared.

“We’ll give them a run for their money,” she said. “Oh yes we will! By God we will! Eh, love?” and she stepped through the smoke, which now contained nothing except the faint, unpleasant sensation of being turned slowly upside down.

Iris may turn out to be surprisingly accurate,
she thought,
about the Great Trans-Temporal Cadre of Heroes and Heroines.

Even if the only thing trans-temporal about them is their attitudes. The attitudes that are not detachable from my special and peculiar skills.

If I have anything to say about it.

But that's another story.

If a man can resist the influences of his townsfolk, if he can cut free from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip, the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition.

—John Jay Chapman

 

I often watched our visitor reading
in the living room, sitting under the floor lamp near the new, standing Philco radio, with her long, long legs stretched out in front of her and the pool of light on her book revealing so little of her face: brownish, coppery features so marked that she seemed to be a kind of freak and hair that was reddish black but so rough that it looked like the things my mother used for scouring pots and pans. She read a great deal, that summer. If I ventured out of the archway, where I was not exactly hiding but only keeping in the shadow to watch her read, she would often raise her face and smile silently at me before beginning to read again, and her skin would take on an abrupt, surprising pallor as it moved into the light. When she got up and went into the kitchen with the gracefulness of a stork, for something to eat, she was almost too tall for the doorways; she went on legs like a spider’s, with long swinging arms and a little body in the middle, the strange proportions of the very tall. She looked down at my mother’s plates and dishes from a great, gentle height, remarkably absorbed; and asking me a few odd questions, she would bend down over whatever she was going to eat, meditate on it for a few moments like a giraffe, and then straightening up back into the stratosphere, she would pick up the plate in one thin hand, curling around it fingers like legs, and go back gracefully into the living room. She would lower herself into the chair that was always too small, curl her legs around it, become dissatisfied, settle herself, stretch them out again—I remember so well those long, hard, unladylike legs—and begin again to read.

She used to ask, “What is that? What is that? And what is this?” but that was only at first.

My mother, who disliked her, said she was from the circus and we ought to try to understand and be kind. My father made jokes. He did not like big women or short hair—which was still new in places like ours—or women who read, although she was interested in his carpentry and he liked that.

But she was six feet four inches tall; this was in 1925.

My father was an accountant who built furniture as a hobby; we had a gas stove which he actually fixed once when it broke down and some outdoor tables and chairs he had built in the back yard. Before our visitor came on the train for her vacation with us, I used to spend all my time in the back yard, being underfoot, but once we had met her at the station and she shook hands with my father—I think she hurt him when she shook hands—I would watch her read and wish that she might talk to me.

She said: “You are finishing high school?”

I was in the archway, as usual; I answered yes.

She looked up at me again, then down at her book. She said, “This is a very bad book.” I said nothing. Without looking up, she tapped one finger on the shabby hassock on which she had put her feet. Then she looked up and smiled at me. I stepped tentatively from the floor to the rug, as reluctantly as if I were crossing the Sahara; she swung her feet away and I sat down. At close view her face looked as if every race in the world had been mixed and only the worst of each kept; an American Indian might look like that, or Ikhnaton from the encyclopedia, or a Swedish African, a Maori princess with the jaw of a Slav. It occurred to me suddenly that she might be a Negro, but no one else had ever seemed to think so, possibly because nobody in our town had ever seen a Negro. We had none. They were “colored people.”

She said, “You are not pretty, yes?”

I got up. I said, “My father thinks you’re a freak.”

“You are sixteen,” she said, “sit down,” and I sat down. I crossed my arms over my breasts because they were too big, like balloons. Then she said, “I am reading a very stupid book. You will take it away from me, yes?’’

“No,” I said.

“You must,” she said, “or it will poison me, sure as God,” and from her lap she plucked up
The Green Hat: A Romance,
gold letters on green binding, last year’s bestseller which I had had to swear never to read, and she held it out to me, leaning back in her chair with that long arm doing all the work, the book enclosed in a cage of fingers wrapped completely around it. I think she could have put those fingers around a basketball. I did not take it.

“Go on,” she said, “read it, go on, go away,” and I found myself at the archway, by the foot of the stairs with
The Green Hat: A Romance
in my hand. I turned it so the title was hidden. She was smiling at me and had her arms folded back under her head. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Your body will be in fashion by the time of the next war.” I met my mother at the top of the stairs and had to hide the book from her, my mother said, “Oh, the poor woman!” She was carrying some sheets. I went to my room and read through almost the whole night, hiding the book in the bedclothes when I was through. When I slept, I dreamt of Hispano-Suizas, of shingled hair and tragic eyes; of women with painted lips who had Affairs, who went night after night with Jews to low dives, who lived as they pleased, who had miscarriages in expensive Swiss clinics; of midnight swims, of desperation, of money, of illicit love, of a beautiful Englishman and getting into a taxi with him while wearing a cloth-of-silver cloak and a silver turban like the ones shown in the society pages of the New York City newspapers.

Unfortunately our guest’s face kept recurring in my dream, and because I could not make out whether she was amused or bitter or very much of both, it really spoiled everything.

My mother discovered the book the next morning. I found it next to my plate at breakfast. Neither my mother nor my father made any remark about it; only my mother kept putting out the breakfast things with a kind of tender, reluctant smile. We all sat down, finally, when she had put out everything, and my father helped me to rolls and eggs and ham. Then he took off his glasses and folded them next to his plate. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. Then he looked at the book and said in a tone of mock surprise, “Well! What’s this?”

I didn’t say anything. I only looked at my plate.

“I believe I’ve seen this before,” he said. “Yes, I believe I have.” Then he asked my mother, “Have you seen this before?” My mother made a kind of vague movement with her head. She had begun to butter some toast and was putting it on my plate. I knew she was not supposed to discipline me; only my father was. “Eat your egg,” she said. My father, who had continued to look at
The Green Hat: A Romance
with the same expression of unvarying surprise, finally said: