Alyx - Joanna Russ

by Unknown Author

  “She’s sick,” said Alyx.

  “Oh no,” said everybody else.

  “She’s got a fever,” said Alyx.

  “No, no,” said one of the nuns, “it’s the drug.”

  “What—drug?” said Alyx, controlling her temper. How these people could manage to get into such scrapes—

  “It’s Re-Juv,” said Gavrily. “She’s been taking Re-Juv and of course the withdrawal symptoms don’t come on for a couple of weeks. But she’ll be all right.”

  “It’s an unparalleled therapeutic opportunity,” said the other nun. Maudey was moaning that nobody cared about her, that nobody had ever paid any attention to her, and whereas other people’s dolls were normal when they were little, hers had only had a limited stock of tapes and could only say the same things over and over, just like a person. She said she had always known it wasn’t real. No one touched her. They urged her to integrate this perception with her unstable self-image.

  “Are you going,” said Alyx, “to let her go on like that all night?"

  “We wouldn’t think of stopping her,” said Gavrily in a shocked voice and they all went back to talking. “Why wasn’t your doll alive?” said one of the nuns in a soft voice. “Think, now; tell us, why do you feel—” Alyx pushed past two of them to try to touch the woman or take her hand, but at this point Maudey got swiftly up and walked out of the cave.

  “Eight gods and seven devils!” shouted Alyx in her own language. She realized a nun was clinging to each arm.

  “Please don’t be distressed,” they said, “she’ll come back,” like twins in unison, only one actually said “She’ll return” and the other “She’ll come back.” Voices pursued her from the cave, everlastingly those damned voices; she wondered if they knew how far an insane woman could wander in a snowstorm. Insane she was, drug or no drug; Alyx had seen too many people behave too oddly under too many different circumstances to draw unnecessary distinctions. She found Maudey some thirty meters along the rock-face, crouching against it.

  “Maudey, you must come back,” said Alyx.

  “Oh, I know you,” said Maudey, in a superior tone.

  “You will get lost in the snow,” said Alyx softly, carefully freeing one hand from its glove, “and you won’t be comfortable and warm and get a good night’s sleep. Now come along.”

  Maudey smirked and cowered and said nothing.

  “Come back and be comfortable and warm,” said Alyx. “Come back and go to sleep. Come, dear, come on, dear,” and she caught Maudey’s arm with her gloved hand and with the other pressed a blood vessel at the base of her neck. The woman passed out immediately and fell down in the snow. Alyx kneeled over her, holding one arm back against the joint, just in case Maudey should decide to get contentious. And how, she thought, do you get her back now when she weighs twice as much as you, clever one? The wind gave them a nasty shove, then gusted in the other direction. Maudey was beginning to stir. She was saying something louder and louder; finally Alyx heard it.

  “I’m a living doll,” Maudey was saying, “I’m a living doll, I’m a living doll, I’m a living doll!” interspersed with terrible sobs.

  They do tell the truth, thought Alyx, sometimes. “You,” she said firmly, “are a woman. A woman. A woman.”

  “I’m a doll!” cried Maudey.

  “You,” said Alyx, “are a woman. A woman with dyed hair. A silly woman. But a woman. A woman!”

  “No I’m not,” said Maudey stubbornly, like an older Iris.

  “Oh, you’re a damned fool!” snapped Alyx, peering nervously about and hoping that their voices would not attract anything. She did not expect people, but she knew that where there are goats or things like goats there are things that eat the things that are like goats.

  “Am I damned?” said Maudey. “What’s damned?”

  “Lost,” said Alyx absently, and slipping her gloved hand free, she lifted the crossbow from its loop on her back, loaded it and pointed it away at the ground. Maudey was wiggling her freed arm, with an expression of pain. “You hurt me,” she said. Then she saw the bow and sat up in the snow, terrified, shrinking away.

  “Will you shoot me, will you shoot me?” she cried.

  “Shoot you?” said Alyx.

  “You’ll shoot me, you hate me!” wailed Maudey, clawing at the rock-face. “You hate me, you hate me, you’ll kill me!”

  “I think I will,” said Alyx simply, “unless you go back to the cave.”

  “No, no, no,” said Maudey.

  “If you don’t go back to the cave,” said Alyx carefully, “I am going to shoot you,” and she drove the big woman in front of her, step by step, back along the narrow side of the mountain, back on her own tracks that the snow had already half-obliterated, back through Paradise to the opening of the cave. She trained the crossbow on Maudey until the woman stepped into the group of people inside; then she stood there, blocking the entrance, the bow in her hand.

  “One of you,” she said, “tie her wrists together.”

  “You are doing incalculable harm,” said one of the nuns.

  “Machine,” she said, “take rope from your pack. Tie that woman’s wrists together and then tie them to Gavrily’s feet and the nuns’ feet and Iris’s. Give them plenty of room but make the knots fast.”

  “I hear and obey,” said Raydos dryly, answering for the boy, who was apparently doing what she had told him to.

  “You and Raydos and I and Gunnar will stand watch,” she said.

  “What’s there to watch, for heaven’s sake,” muttered Iris. Alyx thought she probably did not like being connected to Maudey in any way at all, not even for safety.

  “Really,” said Gavrily, “she would have come back, you know! I think you might try to understand that!”

  “I would have come back,” said Maudey in a surprisingly clear and sensible tone, “of course I would have come back, don’t be silly,” and this statement precipitated such a clamor of discussion, vilification, self-justification and complaints that Alyx stepped outside the cave with her blood pounding in her ears and her hands grasping the stock of the crossbow. She asked the gods to give her strength, although she did not believe in them and never had. Her jaws felt like iron; she was shaking with fury.

  Then she saw the bear. It was not twenty meters away.

  “Quiet!” she hissed. They went on talking loudly.

  “QUIET!” she shouted, and as the talk died down to an injured and peevish mutter, she saw that the bear—if it was a bear—had heard them and was slowly, curiously, calmly, coming over to investigate. It seemed to be grayish-white, like the snow, and longer in the neck than it should be.

  “Don’t move,” she said very softly, “there is an animal out here,” and in the silence that followed she saw the creature hesitate, swaying a little or lumbering from side to side. It might very well pass them by. It stopped, sniffed about and stood there for what seemed three or four minutes, then fell clumsily on to all fours and began to move slowly away.

  Then Maudey screamed. Undecided no longer, the animal turned and flowed swiftly towards them, unbelievably graceful over the broken ground and the sharply sloping hillside. Alyx stood very still. She said, “Machine, your bow,” and heard Gunnar whisper “Kill it, kill it, why don’t you kill it!” The beast was almost upon her. At the last moment she knelt and sent a bolt between its eyes; then she dropped down automatically and swiftly, rolling to one side, dropping the bow. She snatched her knives from both her sleeves and threw herself under the swaying animal, driving up between the ribs first with one hand and then the other. The thing fell on her immediately like a dead weight; it was too enormous, too heavy for her to move; she lay there trying to breathe, slowly blacking out and feeling her ribs begin to give way. Then she fainted and came to to find Gunnar and Machine rolling the enormous carcass off her. She lay, a swarm of black sparks in front of her eyes. Machine wiped the beast’s blood off her suit—it came off absolutely clean with a handful of snow —and carried he
r like a doll to a patch of clean snow where she began to breathe. The blood rushed back to her head. She could think again.

  “It’s dead,” said Gunnar unsteadily, “I think it died at once from the bolt.”

  “Oh you devils!” gasped Alyx.

  “I came out at once,” said Machine, with some relish. “He didn’t.” He began pressing his hands rhythmically against her sides. She felt better.

  “The boy—the boy put a second bolt in it,” said Gunnar, after a moment’s hesitation. “I was afraid,” he added. “I’m sorry.”

  “Who let that woman scream?” said Alyx.

  Gunnar shrugged helplessly.

  “Always know anatomy,” said Machine, with astonishing cheerfulness. “You see, the human body is a machine. I know some things,” and he began to drag the animal away.

  “Wait,” said Alyx. She found she could walk. She went over and looked at the thing. It was a bear but like none she had ever seen or heard of: a white bear with a long, snaky neck, almost four meters high if it had chosen to stand. The fur was very thick.

  “It’s a polar bear,” said Gunnar.

  She wanted to know what that was.

  “It’s an Old Earth animal,” he said, “but it must have been adapted. They usually live in the sea, I think. They have been stocking Paradise with Old Earth animals. I thought you knew.”

  “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 o
pen.

  “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.