Alyx - Joanna Russ (10 page)

“My dear!” he gasped.

She looked at him expressionlessly.

“Help me,” he whispered, “eh?” His fingers fluttered. “Over there,” he said eagerly, “medicines. Make me well, eh? Good and fast. I’ll give you half.”

“All,” she said.

“Yes, yes, all,” he said breathlessly, “all—explain all—fascinating hobby—spend most of my time in this room—get the medicine—”

“First show me,” she said, “how to turn it off.”

“Off?” he said. He watched her, bright-eyed.

“First,” she said patiently, “I will turn it all off. And then I will cure you.”

“No,” he said, “no, no! Never!” She knelt down beside him.

“Come,” she said softly, “do you think I want to destroy it? I am as fascinated by it as you are. I only want to make sure you can’t do anything to me, that’s all. You must explain it all first until I am master of it, too, and then we will turn it on.”

“No, no,” he repeated suspiciously.

“You must,” she said, “or you’ll die. What do you think I plan to do? I have to cure you, because otherwise how can I learn to work all this? But I must be safe, too. Show me how to turn it off.”

He pointed, doubtfully.

“Is that it?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “but—”

“Is that it?”

“Yes, but—no—wait!” for Alyx sprang to her feet and fetched from his stool the pillow on which he had been sitting, the purpose of which he did not at first seem to comprehend, but then his eyes went wide with horror, for she had got the pillow in order to smother him, and that is just what she did.

When she got to her feet, her legs were trembling. Stumbling and pressing both hands together as if in prayer to subdue their shaking, she took the cube that held her husband’s picture and carefully—oh, how carefully!—turned the lever to the right. Then she began to sob. It was not the weeping of grief, but a kind of reaction and triumph, all mixed; in the middle of that eerie room she stood, and threw her head back and yelled. The light burned steadily on. In the shadows she found the fat man’s master switch, and leaning against the wall, put one finger—only one—on it and caught her breath. Would the world end? She did not know. After a few minutes’ search she found a candle and flint hidden away in a cupboard and with this she made herself a light; then, with eyes closed, with a long shudder, she leaned—no, sagged—against the switch, and stood for a long moment, expecting and believing nothing.

But the world did not end. From outside came the wind and the sound of the sea-wash (though louder now, as if some indistinct and not quite audible humming had just ended) and inside fantastic shadows leapt about the candle—the lights had gone out. Alyx began to laugh, catching her breath. She set the candle down and searched until she found a length of metal tubing that stood against the wall, and then she went from machine to machine, smashing, prying, tearing, toppling tables and breaking controls. Then she took the candle in her unsteady hand and stood over the body of the fat man, a phantasmagoric lump on the floor, badly lit at last. Her shadow loomed on the wall. She leaned over him and studied his face, that face that had made out of agony and death the most appalling trivialities. She thought:

Make the world? You hadn’t the imagination. You didn’t even make these machines; that shiny finish is for customers, not craftsmen, and controls that work by little pictures are for children. You are a child yourself, a child and a horror, and I would ten times rather be subject to your machinery than master of it.

Aloud she said:

“Never confuse the weapon and the arm,” and taking the candle, she went away and left him in the dark.

She got home at dawn and, as her man lay asleep in bed, it seemed to her that he was made out of the light of the dawn that streamed through his fingers and his hair, irradiating him with gold. She kissed him and he opened his eyes.

“You’ve come home,” he said.

“So I have,” said she.

“I fought all night,” she added, “with the Old Man of the Mountain,” for you must know that this demon is a legend in Ourdh; he is the god of this world who dwells in a cave containing the whole world in little, and from his cave he rules the fates of men.

“Who won?” said her husband, laughing, for in the sunrise when everything is suffused with light it is difficult to see the seriousness of injuries.

“I did!” said she. “The man is dead.” She smiled, splitting open the wound on her cheek, which began to bleed afresh. “He died,” she said, “for two reasons only: because he was a fool. And because we are not.”

She added, “I’ll tell you all about it.”

But that’s another story.

She was a soft-spoken, dark-haired, small-boned
woman, not even coming up to their shoulders, like a kind of dwarf or miniature—but that was normal enough for a Mediterranean Greek of nearly four millennia ago, before super-diets and hybridization from seventy colonized planets had turned all humanity (so she had been told) into Scandinavian giants. The young lieutenant, who was two meters and a third tall, or three heads more than herself, very handsome and ebony-skinned, said “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I cannot believe you’re the proper Trans-Temporal Agent; I think—” and he finished his thought on the floor, his head under one of his ankles and this slight young woman (or was she young? Trans-Temp did such strange things sometimes!) somehow holding him down in a position he could not get out of without hurting himself to excruciation. She let him go. She sat down on the balloon-inflated thing they provided for sitting on in these strange times, looking curiously at the super-men and super-women, and said, “I am the Agent. My name is Alyx,” and smiled. She was in a rather good humor. It still amused her to watch this whole place, the transparent columns the women wore instead of clothing, the parts of the walls that pulsated in and out and changed color, the strange floor that waved like grass, the three-dimensional vortices that kept springing to life on what would have been the ceiling if it had only stayed in one place (but it never did) and the general air of unhappy, dogged, insistent, sad restlessness. “A little bit of home,” the lieutenant had called it. He had seemed to find particular cause for nostalgia in a lime-green coil that sprang out of the floor whenever anybody dropped anything, to eat it up, but it was “not in proper order” and sometimes you had to fight it for something you wanted to keep. The people moved her a little closer to laughter. One of them leaned toward her now.

“Pardon me,” said this one effusively—it was one of the ladies— “but is that face yours? I’ve heard Trans-Temp does all sorts of cosmetic work and I thought they might—”

“Why yes,” said Alyx, hoping against hope to be impolite. “Are those breasts yours? I can’t help noticing—”

“Not at all!” cried the lady happily. “Aren’t they wonderful? They’re Adrian’s. I mean they’re by Adrian.”

“I think that’s enough,” said the lieutenant.

“Only we
rather wondered,”
said the lady, elevating her indigo brows at what she seemed to have taken as an insult, “why you keep yourself so covered up. Is it a tribal rite? Are you deformed? Why don’t you get cosmetic treatment; you could have asked for it, you know, I mean I think you could—” but here everybody went pale and turned aside, just as if she had finally managed to do something offensive and
All
 
I
 
did,
she thought,
was take off my shift.

One of the nuns fell to praying.

“All right, Agent,” said the lieutenant, his voice a bare whisper, “we believe you. Please put on your clothes.

“Please, Agent,” he said again, as if his voice were failing him, but she did not move, only sat naked and cross-legged with the old scars on her ribs and belly showing in a perfectly natural and expectable way, sat and looked at them one by one: the two nuns, the lady, the young girl with her mouth hanging open and the iridescent beads wound through three feet of hair, the bald-headed boy with some contraption strapped down over his ears, eyes and nose, the artist and the middle-aged political man, whose right cheek had begun to jump. The artist was leaning forward with his hand cupped under one eye in the old-fashioned and nearly unbelievable pose of someone who has just misplaced a contact lens. He blinked and looked up at her through a flood of mechanical tears.

“The lieutenant,” he said, coughing a little, “is thinking of anaesthetics and the lady of surgery—I really think you had better put your clothes back on, by the way—and as to what the others think I’m not so sure. I myself have only had my usual trouble with these damned things and I don’t really mind—”

“Please, Agent,” said the young officer.

“But I don’t think,” said the artist, massaging one eye, “that you quite understand the effect you’re creating.”

“None of
you
has anything on,” said Alyx.

“You have on your history,” said the artist, “and we’re not used to that, believe me. Not to history. Not to old she-wolves with livid marks running up their ribs and arms, and not to the idea of fights in which people are neither painlessly killed nor painlessly fixed up but linger on and die—slowly—or heal—slowly.

“Well!” he added, in a very curious tone of voice, “after all, we may all look like that before this is over."

“Buddha, no!” gasped a nun.

Alyx put her clothes on, tying the black belt around the black dress. “You may not look as bad,” she said a bit sourly. “But you will certainly smell worse.

“And I,” she added conversationally, “don’t like pieces of plastic in people’s teeth. I think it disgusting.”

“Refined sugar,” said the officer, “one of our minor vices,” and then, with an amazed expression, he burst into tears.

“Well, well,” muttered the young girl, “we’d better get on with it.”

“Yes,” said the middle-aged man, laughing nervously, “‘People for Every Need,’ you know,” and before he could be thoroughly rebuked for quoting the blazon of the Trans-Temporal Military Authority (Alyx heard the older woman begin lecturing him on the nastiness of calling anyone even by insinuation a thing, an agency, a means or an instrument,
anything
but a People, or as she said “a People People”) he began to lead the file toward the door, with the girl coming next, a green tube in the middle of her mouth, the two nuns clinging together in shock, the bald-headed boy swaying a little as he walked, as if to unheard music, the lieutenant and the artist—who lingered.

“Where’d they pick you up?” he said, blinking again and fingering one eye.

“Off Tyre,” said Alyx. “Where’d they pick
you
up?”

“We,” said the artist, “are rich tourists. Can you believe it? Or refugees, rather. Caught up in a local war. A war on the surface of a planet, mind you; I don’t believe I’ve heard of that in my lifetime.”

“I have,” said Alyx, “quite a few times,” and with the lightest of light pushes she guided him toward the thing that passed for a decent door; the kind of thing she had run through, roaring with laughter, time after time at her first day at Trans-Temp, just for the pleasure of seeing it open up like a giant mouth and then pucker shut in an enormous expression of disgust.

“Babies!” she said.

“By the way,” called back the artist, “I’m a flat-color man. What was your profession?”

“Murderer,” said Alyx, and she stepped through the door.

* * *

“Raydos is the flat-color man,” said the lieutenant, his feet up on what looked gratifyingly like a table. “Used to do wraparounds and walk-ins—very good walk-ins, too, I have a little education in that line myself—but he’s gone wild about something called pigment on flats. Says the other stuff’s too easy.”

“Flats whats?” said Alyx.

“I don’t know, any flat surface, I suppose,” said the lieutenant. “And he’s got those machines in his eyes which keep coming out, but he won’t get retinotherapy. Says he likes having two kinds of vision. Most of us are born myopic nowadays, you know.”

“I wasn’t,” said Alyx.

“Iris,” the lieutenant went on, palming something and then holding it to his ear, “is pretty typical, though: young, pretty stable, ditto the older woman—oh yes, her name’s Maudey—and Gavrily’s a conamon, of course.”

“Conamon?” said Alyx, with some difficulty.

“Influence,” said the lieutenant, his face darkening a little. “Influence, you know. I don’t like the man. That’s too personal an evaluation, of course, but damn it, I’m a decent man. If I don’t like him, I say I don’t like him. He’d honor me for it.”

“Wouldn’t he kick your teeth in?” said Alyx.

“How much did they teach you at Trans-Temp?” said the lieutenant, after a pause.

“Not much,” said Alyx.

“Well, anyway,” said the lieutenant, a little desperately, “you’ve got Gavrily and he’s a conamon, then Maudey—the one with the blue eyebrows, you know—”

“Dyed?” asked Alyx politely.

“Of course. Permanently. And the wienie—”

“Well, well!” said Alyx.

“You know,” said the lieutenant, with sarcastic restraint, “you can’t drink that stuff like wine. It’s distilled. Do you know what distilled means?”

“Yes,” said Alyx. “I found out the hard way.”

“All right,” said the lieutenant, jumping to his feet, “all right! A wienie is a wienie. He’s the one with the bald head. He calls himself Machine because he’s an idiotic adolescent rebel and he wears that—that Trivia on his head to give himself twenty-four hours a day of solid nirvana, station NOTHING, turns off all stimuli when you want it to, operates psionically. We call it a Trivia because that’s what it is and because forty years ago it was a Tri-V and I
despise
bald young inexistential rebels who refuse to relate!”

“Well, well,” she said again.

“And the nuns,” he said, “are nuns, whatever that means to you. It means nothing to me; I am not a religious man. You have got to get them from here to there, ‘across the border’ as they used to say, because they had money and they came to see Paradise and Paradise turned into—” He stopped and turned to her.