Alice: The Girl From Earth

by Kir Bulychev

  They answered that the city had no cellars, all the potentially secluded spots had been searched by the school children and the students at the Martian University who knew them all by heart.

  I was very angry with Alice. Just about now I expected her to emerge from some corner or hole with the most innocent look on her face. But her behavior had inflicted enormous bother and cost, worse than a bad sand storm. All the Martians, and all the Earthmen living in the city had been torn from their own affairs and business, and set out on foot to join the rescue service. At the same time I was terribly worried. This little adventure of hers could end terribly badly.

  News from the search parties was flowing in constantly.

  “Third Martian Technical School students report they have search the stadium. No Alice.” “MarsSweets candy factory reports no child found on our property.”

  “Is it possible that she managed to get out into the desert?” I mused. In the city, they would have certainly found her by now. The Martian deserts are still not well explored, and one could get lost there so throughly they would not find you in ten years’ searching. But the closest regions of the desert had already been searched by people in walkers.

  “They found her!” A Martian in a blue tunic shouted; he was looking at his pocket-com.

  “Where? How? Where?” Everyone under the dome shouted in excitement.

  “In the desert. Some two hundred kilometers from here.”

  “Two hundred?!”

  Of course. I thought. They don’t know Alice. Something entirely expected…

  “The child is all right and will be here soon.”

  “And just how did she get out there?”

  “In a postal rocket.”

  “Of course!” Tatiana Petronva said and started to cry uncontrollably. She had endured far more than anyone else. Everyone ran to console her.

  “We went on a walk that took us past the post office. They were loading the automated postal rockets. But I didn’t pay it any attention. You see them more than a hundred times a day!”

  But ten minutes later, when a Martian flyer brought Alice in, everything became clear.

  “I went inside to get your letter, Papa.” Alice said.

  “What letter?”

  “Papa, you said that mama was going to write us a letter. So I went inside the rocket to see if it was there.”

  “You just got inside?”

  “Of course. The door was open, and there were a lot of letters there…”

  “And then…”

  “As soon as I got inside the door closed, and the rocket took off. I started to press buttons to stop it. There were a lot of buttons. When I pressed the last one the rocket went down and then the door opened. I went out, but it was all sand around everywhere, and Auntie Tanya wasn’t there, and the other kids weren’t there…”

  “She hit the emergency landing button.” The Martian in the blue tunic said with admiration in his voice.

  “I cried a lot, then I decided to walk home.”

  “But how did you decide which way to go?

  “I went up on a small hill to look around. And there was a door in the hill. I couldn’t see anything at all from the hill. So I went inside the room and sat down there.”

  “What door?” The Martian was amazed. “That region is completely empty.”

  “No, there was a door, and room. And in the room there’s a big stone. Like an Egyptian pyramid. Only small. Remember, Papa, you read me that book on Egyptian pyramids.”

  Alice’s unexpected revelation produced consternation among the Martians and Nazaryan, the Rescue Chief.

  “The Tewteqs!” They shouted.

  “Where did you find the girl? The map coordinates!”

  And half those present vanished in a puff of smoke.

  But Tatiana Petrovna, who had started to feed Alice, told me that many thousands of years ago there had existed on Mars a mysterious civil ization called the Tewteqs. All that remained of them were stone pyramids. Up to now, neither the Martians nor the archaeologists from Earth had been able to find a single example of Tewteq construction. Just pyramids, scattered around the desert and drowned in sand. And here Alice had come across a Tewteq ruin by accident.

  “So here we are, and nothing bad happened, again.” I said. “But I am going to take you back home right away, anyway. On Earth you can get lost as much as you want. Without a helmet.

  “I like getting lost at home more too.” Alice said.

  Two months later I was reading an article entitled “What were the Tewteqs?” in the magazine Around The World. In the article the writers described how they were at last able to examine an intact Tewteq archeological site. The scientists were now occupied with the deciphering of the inscriptions found in the site. But what was most interesting, on the pyramid itself they observed the drawing of a Tewteq, preserved as though it had been carved yesterday. And there was the photograph of the pyramid with the Tewteq portrait….

  The portrait was somewhat familiar. I was suddenly overcome with a horrible suspicion.

  “Alice.” I said in my strictest of Strict Father voices. “Answer me honestly: did you draw anything at all on the pyramid when you were lost in the desert?”

  Before she answered, Alice walked over and looked at the picture in the magazine very carefully.

  “You’re right, Papa. I did draw it. Only it wasn’t really drawing. I had to scrape it with a small stone. I was so bored there….”

  Shusher the Timid

  Alice has many pets: two kittens, a Martian Mantis which lives beneath her bed, and which spends its nights imitating the balalaika, a hedgehog which lived with us for a while and then ran back to the forest, the brontosaur Bronty, who lets Alice ride his back in the Zoo, and finally the neighbor’s dog, Rex, a lap dog I suspect is really a mongrel.

  Alice acquired one other pet when the first expedition to Sirius returned.

  Alice had met Poloskov. I do not know quite how she arranged it; Alice seems to know everyone. Somehow or other she was with the group of children that brought the returning space men flowers. Imagine my surprise when I saw Alice running along the red carpet with a bouquet of blue roses bigger than she was and handing them to Poloskov himself.

  Poloskov took the bouquet, took my daughter’s hand in his, and together they listened to the welcoming speeches, and they left together.

  Alice only returned home in the evening, carrying a large red basket in her hands.

  “And where were you?”

  “The kindergarten, mostly.” She answered.

  “And where were you leastly?”

  “Well, they took us to the space port?”

  “And afterwards?”

  Alice understood that I was just as capable of watching the television as she. She said:

  “And then they asked me to greet the space men.”

  “And who was it who asked you?”

  “Someone. You don’t know him.”

  “Alice, have you ever made the acquaintances of the term ‘corporal punishment?’“

  “It’s when they spank you. But I thought that was just in fairy tales.”

  “I fear we shall have to turn fairy tales into reality. Why do you always get into places you shouldn’t go?”

  Alice pouted, but suddenly the red basket in her hands began to shake.

  “And just what is that?”

  “A gift. From Poloskov.”

  “You inveigled you begged a gift from him. Now, that simply isn’t….”

  “I didn’t ask him for anything. It’s a shusher. Poloskov brought them back from Sirius. It’s a baby shusher. A shusher-cub. A shushin. Shushy?”

  And Alice carefully reached into the basket and lifted out a small, six pawed little animal similar to a kangaroo. The baby shusher had large, compound eyes. He was turning them every which way, clutching tightly at Alice’s dress with the upper pair of paws.

  “See, he loves me already.” Alice said. “I’m going to make h
im a bed.”

  I already knew the story about the shushers. Everyone knew the story about the shushers, my fellow biologists especially. I had five shushers in the zoo already, and in a day or so we were expecting additions to their family.

  Poloskov and Zeleny had discovered the Shusers on one of the planets of the Sirius system. They were tame, harmless little animals who wouldn’t go a step from the spacemen once they found the Earthmen’s camp. They turned out to be mammals, although in behavior they more resembled terrestrial penguins. They exhibited quiet curiosity and were constantly attempting to crawl into the most unlikely and unhealthy places. Zeleny even had to save a shusher once before it could drown in a large can of condensed milk. The expedition made an entire film about the shushers which had been enormously successful on the entertainment channels and the web.

  Unfortunately the expedition simply did not have enough time to study the shushers as they should have; they knew the shushers came into the expedition’s camp at sunrise and vanished with the sun, hiding in among the rocks.

  However they managed it, when the expedition had already taken off for home, Poloskov discovered three shushers who had evidently gotten aboard the ship. Naturally Poloskov’s first thought was that the shushers had been brought on board as contraband by one of the expedition’s members, but the distress of his comrades was so sincere that Poloskov soon abandoned his suspicions.

  The appearance of the shushers produced a whole mass of consequent problems. First of all they might very well be a source of some unknown infection. Secondly, they might very well die en route back to Earth when the ship made its jump. Thirdly, no one knew what they ate. And so on.

  But all of the dangers proved, in the end, to be chimeras. The shushers went through disinfection without the slightest problem at all, they dutifully subsisted on bouillon and dried fruits. This made them a lifelong enemy in Zeleny, who had a taste for fruit himself and had to spend the last months of the expedition getting his vitamins from pills in order to ‘feed the mice.’

  Over the course of the long flight back to Earth the Shushes gave birth to six kits. As a result the ship reached Earth orbit filled to the gills with shushers and shusher kits. They turned out to be quick witted little animals and, other than Zeleny, none of the crew suffered the slightest unpleasantness or inconvenience.

  I remember the historic moment when the expedition landed back on Earth, when, under the glare of the television and film cameras the airlock opened, and, instead of the spacemen, first through the orifice was an astonishing, furry animal. And after that came several more, just smaller. You could hear the gasp of astonishment around the world, but it cut off a moment later when a laughing Poloskov followed the shushers from out of the ship. In his hands he had one of the kits, condensed milk still smeared on its fur.

  One part of the contingent of animals ended up in the zoo, others remained with spacemen who refused to give them up. Poloskov’s shusher kit finally reached Alice. The Lord alone knows how my daughter charmed the spaceman out of the shusher.

  Shusher lived in a large basket right beside Alice’s bed; he got along fine without meat, slept nights, made friends with the cats and the large Martian Mantis, and he purred in a low, quiet voice when Alice petted him or told him how good he was or what he had done wrong.

  Shusher grew very quickly and two months later he stood as tall as my daughter. They went for walks in the small garden across the street and Alice never put a collar and leash on to him.

  “But what if something frightens him?” I asked. “He might get run over.”

  “No, nothing frightens him. And anyway, he’d really be embarrassed if I put him on a leash. He’s really very sensitive.”

  One time Alice could not get to sleep. She was very cranky and after I put her to bed she called me on the house com and insisted that I read to her about Doctor Doolittle.

  “Not now, kid.” I said. “I have work to do right now. Besides, it’s time you started reading your own books.”

  “But it’s not in the book, Papa. It’s still on the old microfilm and the letters are too small.”

  “So that’s why we have the book reader. If you don’t want to read yourself, turn on the sound.”

  “But I’d have to get up, and it’s cold.”

  “Then you have to wait a while. When I finish writing I’ll turn it on for you.”

  “If you won’t do it, I’ll ask Shusher.”

  “Ask him all you want.” I laughed.

  And a few minutes later I suddenly heard from the room next door the microfilm reader voice say: “…lived in a little town called Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. All the folks….”.

  And that meant Alice had gotten out of bed anyway and turned on the reader.

  “Back to bed right now!” I shouted. “Go to sleep!”

  “But I am in the bed.”

  “You mustn’t lie to me. Just who turned on the reader?”

  “Shusher.”

  One thing I will not permit is for my daughter to grow up a liar. I put aside my work, went into her room, planning to have a very serious conversation.

  The book reader screen on the wall had been turned on. Shusher was at the control panel. On the screen Doctor Doolittle was surrounded by unfortunate animals.

  “And how did you manage to teach him to do that trick?” I was truly astonished.

  “I didn’t teach him to do anything. He knows how to do it all on his own.”

  Shusher crossed his upper pair of paws on his chest in embarrassment.

  There was a strained moment of silence.

  “Oh well…” I finally started to say.

  “Pardon me.” A high pitched, husky voice broke the silence. It was Shusher speaking. “But I really did teach myself. It wasn’t very difficult.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “It wasn’t at all difficult.” Shusher repeated. “You showed me how to work it yourself when you showed Alice the tale of the Mantis king the day before yesterday.”

  “No, that doesn’t matter. How did you learn to speak?”

  “I showed him how.” Alice said.

  “But I don’t understand it at all! Dozens of biologists are working with the shushers and not once has a single shusher said a word to any of us!”

  “But our shusher can read too, can’t you?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “He’s told me a lot of interesting things…”

  “I’ve become great friends with your daughter.”

  “But why were you silent for so long?”

  “He’s timid.” Alice answered for him.

  Shusher blinked his eyes.

  A Parition of the Night

  We spend our summers in Vnukovo. It’s very convenient; the monorail station is five minutes walk from the old country house. In the forest on the other side of the road grow different kinds of edible mushrooms, the brown caps that grow beneath the birches and the orange caps that grow near the pines, but they are far outnumbered by the mushroom hunters.

  I arrived at the country house straight from the Zoo and instead of settling in to a rest found myself up to my ears in the local goings on. It centered around a local boy, Colin, who had become notorious in the Vnukovo area for seizing other children’s toys. His parents had gone so far as to summon a psychologist from Vladivostok, who had in turn written his dissertation on the lad. The psychologist studied Colin, and Colin ate pot stickers and whimpered all day long. I had brought the kid a model photon rocket just to shut him up.

  Aside from Colin there was his grandmother, who loved to talk about genetics and had written a novel about Mendel, Alice’s grandmother, a kid named Yura and his mother, Karma, a set of triplets on a neighboring street who sang in a chorus underneath my window whether I wanted it or not, and, of course, the apparition.

  The apparition lived somewhere near the apple tree and was a quite recent arrival.

  I was sitting with Alice on the terrace and waiting for the new house ro
bot to finish my super. So far the robot had tried its hands at cooking twice, and failed, leaving two saucepans sitting on the kitchen counter with overdone maccaroni and burned rice, and Alice and I were cussing out the factory, but neither of us wanted to bother with the chore, and Alice’s grandmother had already set off for the theater, nor could we have called for instructions. Our house-com was broken and she had taken the pocket-com with her.

  Alice said:

  “He’ll come today.”

  “Who — he?”

  “My parition.”

  “Ap-parition. One word.” I corrected her automatically, not taking my eyes from the robot.

  “Okay.” Alice wasn’t going to argue. “So he’ll be my AP-parition. And Colin stole some nuts from the twins. Isn’t that remarkable?”

  “Remarkable. What’s your apparition like?”

  “He’s nice.”

  “Everyone you know is nice.”

  “Other than Colin.”

  “All right, other than Colin…. I was thinking; if I brought you home a fire breathing dragon lizard would you be able to make friends with it too?”

  “Sure. Is it nice?”

  “No one’s been able to talk with it yet to find out. It comes from Mars and spits fiery venom.”

  “Sure. They got it angry. Why did they take it from Mars?”

  There was no possible answer that I could give. It as the simple truth. No one had certainly ever asked the lizard when they removed it from Mars. And on the way back to Earth the lizard had eaten the ship’s pet dog, making all of the space men very angry.

  “Well, what can you tell me about the apparition?” I asked to change the subject. “What’s it like.”

  “He only walks when it becomes real dark.”

  “Well, that’s to be expected. From time immemorial. It’s recounted in all of the fairy tales. Colin’s grandmother….”

  “Colin’s grandmother just wants to tell me the history of genetics. How they persecuted Mendel…”

  “Yes, and by the way, does your apparition react to the cry of a cock?”

  “He doesn’t. Why do you ask?”