Alyx - Joanna Russ (20 page)

“Well?” said Gunnar. There was a stir all along the line.

“Sssh,” said Alyx. Nothing happened.

“We’ve been down on our knees,” said Gunnar a bit testily, “for five minutes. I have been looking at my watch.”

“All right, I’ll take a look up,” said Alyx, and leaning on one arm, she used her free hand to pull her hood as far over her face as possible. Slowly she tilted her head and looked.

“Tell us the color of its beak,” said Gunnar.

There was a man hanging in the air forty meters above them. Forty meters up in the sky he sat on nothing, totally unsupported, wearing some kind of green suit with a harness around his waist. She could have sworn that he was grinning. He put out one bare hand and punched the air with his finger; then he came down with such speed that it seemed to Alyx as if he must crash; then he stopped just as abruptly, a meter above the snow and two in front of them. He grinned. Now that he was down she could see the faint outline of what he was traveling in: a transparent bubble, just big enough for one, a transparent shelf of a seat, a transparent panel fixed to the wall. The thing made a slight depression in the snow. She supposed that she could see it because it was not entirely clean. The stranger took out of his harness what even she could recognize as a weapon, all too obviously shaped for the human hand to do God knew what to the human body. He pushed at the wall in front of him and stepped out—swaggering.

“Well?” said Gunnar in a strained whisper.

“His beak,” said Alyx distinctly, “is green and he’s got a gun. Get up,” and they all rocketed to their feet, quickly moving back; she could hear them scrambling behind her. The stranger pointed his weapon and favored them with a most unpleasant smile. He lounged against the side of his ship. It occurred to Alyx with a certain relief that she had known him before, that she had known him in two separate millennia and eight languages, and that he had been the same fool each time; she only hoped mightily that no one would get hurt. She hugged herself as if in fear, taking advantage of the position to take off her gloves and loosen the knives in her sleeves while Machine held his crossbow casually and clumsily in one hand. He was gaping at the stranger like an idiot. Gunnar had drawn himself up, half a head above all of them, again the colossus, his face pale and muscles working around his mouth.

“Well, well,” said the stranger with heavy sarcasm, “break my---” (she did not understand this) “I’m just cruising around and what do I find? A bloody circus!”

Someone—probably a nun—was crying quietly in the back.

“And what’s
that?”
said the stranger. “A dwarf? The Herculean Infant?” He laughed loudly. “Maybe I’ll leave it alone. Maybe if it’s female, I’ll tuck it under my arm after I’ve ticked the rest of you and take it away with me for convenience. Some--!”

and again a word Alyx did not understand. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Machine redden. The stranger was idly kicking the snow in front of him; then with his free hand he pointed negligently at Machine’s crossbow. “What’s that thing?” he said. Machine looked stupid.

“Hey come on, come on, don’t waste my time,” said the stranger. “What is it? I can tick you first, you know. Start telling.”

“It’s a d-d-directional f-f-inder,” Machine stammered, blushing furiously.

“It’s a what?” said the man suspiciously.

“It’s t-to tell direction,” Machine blurted out. “Only it doesn’t work,” he added stiffly.

“Give it here,” said the stranger. Machine obligingly stepped forward, the crossbow hanging clumsily from his hand.

‘'Stay back!”
cried the man, jerking up his gun. “
Don't come near me!”
Machine held out the crossbow, his jaw hanging.

“Stuff it,” said the stranger, trying to sound cool, “I’ll look at it after you’re dead,” and added, “Get in line, Civs,” as if nothing at all had happened.
Ah yes,
thought Alyx. They moved slowly into line, Alyx throwing her arms around Machine as he stepped back, incidentally affording him the cover to pull back the bow’s spring and giving herself the two seconds to say “Belly.” She was going to try to get his gun hand. She got her balance as near perfect as she could while the stranger backed away from them to survey the whole line; she planned to throw from her knees and deflect his arm upward while he shot at the place she had been, and to this end she called out “Mister, what are you going to do with us?”

He walked back along the line, looking her up and down— mostly down, for he was as tall as the rest of them; possibly a woman as small as herself was a kind of expensive rarity. He said, “I’m not going to do anything to
you.
”

“No,” he said, “not to you; I’ll leave you here and pick you up later, Infant. We can all use you.” She looked innocent.

“After I tick these Ops,” he went on, “after we get ’em melted—you’re going to see it, Infant—then I’ll wrap you up and come back for you later. Or maybe take a little now. We’ll see.

“The question,” he added, “is which of you I will tick first. The question is which of you feather-loving Ops I will turn to ashes first and I think, after mature judgment and a lot of decisions and maybe just turning it over in my head, I say I think—”

Gunnar threw himself at the man.

He did so just as Alyx flashed to her knees and turned into an instant blur, just as Machine whipped up the crossbow and let go the bolt, just as Gunnar should have stood still and prayed to whatever gods guard amateur explorers—just at this moment he flung himself forward at the stranger’s feet. There was a flash of light and a high-pitched, horrible scream. Gunnar lay sprawled in the snow. The stranger, weapon dangling from one hand, bleeding in one small line from the belly where Machine’s bolt had hit him, sat in the snow and stared at nothing. Then he bent over and slid onto his side. Alyx ran to the man and snatched the gun from his grasp but he was unmistakably dead; she pulled one of her knives out of his forearm where it had hit him—but high, much too high, damn the balance of the stupid things!—hardly even spoiling his aim— and the other from his neck, grimacing horribly and leaping aside to keep from getting drenched. The corpse fell over on its face. Then she turned to Gunnar.

Gunnar was getting up.

“Well, well,” said Machine from between his teeth, “what— do—you—know!”

“How the devil could I tell you were going to do anything!” shouted Gunnar.

“Did you make that noise for effect,” said Machine, “or was it merely fright?”

“Shut up, you!” cried Gunnar, his face pale.

“Did you wish to engage our sympathies?” said Machine, “or did you intend to confuse the enemy? Was it electronic noise? Is it designed to foul up radar? Does it contribute to the electromagnetic spectrum? Has it a pattern? Does it scan?”

Gunnar stepped forward, his big hands swinging. Machine raised the bow. Both men bent a little at the knees. Then in between them, pale and calm, stepped one of the nuns, looking first at one and then at the other until Gunnar turned his back and Machine—making a face—broke apart the crossbow and draped both parts over his shoulder.

“Someone is hurt,” said the nun.

Gunnar turned back. “That’s impossible!” he said. “Anyone in the way of that beam would be dead, not hurt.”

“Someone,” repeated the nun, “is hurt, and she walked back towards the little knot the others had formed in the snow, clustering about someone on the ground. Gunnar shouted, “It’s not possible!”

“It’s Raydos,” said Machine quietly, somewhere next to Alyx. “It’s not Iris. He just got the edge. The bastard had put it on diffuse. He’s alive,” and taking her by the elbow, he propelled her to the end of the line, where Raydos had been standing almost but not quite in profile, where the stranger had shot when his arm was knocked away and up from his aim on Gunnar, when he had already turned his weapon down on Gunnar because Gunnar was acting like a hero, and not tried to shoot Alyx, who could have dropped beneath the beam, twisted away and killed him before he could shoot again. Strike a man’s arm up into the air and it follows a sweeping curve.

Right over Raydos’s face.

And Raydos’s eyes.

She refused to look at him after the first time. She pushed through the others to take a long look at the unconscious man’s face where he lay, his arms thrown out, in the snow: the precise line where his face began, the precise line where it ended, the fine, powdery, black char that had been carefully laid across the rest of it. Stirred by their breath, the black powder rose in fine spirals. Then she saw the fused circles of Raydos’s eye lenses: black, shiny black, little puddles resting as if in a valley; they still gave out an intense heat. She heard Gunnar say nervously “Put—put snow on it,” and she turned her back remarking, “Snow. And do what you have to do.” She walked slowly over to the transparent bubble. In the distance she could see some kind of activity going on over Raydos, things being brought out of his pack, all sorts of conferring going on. She carefully kicked snow over the dead body. She reflected that Paradise must know them all very well, must know them intimately, in fact, to find the levers to open them one by one until none of them were left or only she was left or none of them were left. Maudey. She stood aside carefully as Gunnar and Machine carried up something that was lacking a face—or rather, his face had turned lumpy and white—and put him in the transparent bubble. That is, Gunnar put him in, getting half in with him for the thing would not hold more than the head and arms of another occupant. Gunnar was taping Raydos to the seat and the walls and working on the control board. Then he said, “I’ll set the automatic location signal to turn itself off an hour after sundown; he did say he was cruising.”

“So you know something,” said Machine. Gunnar went on, his voice a little high:

“I can coordinate it for the Pole station.”

“So you are worth something,” said Machine.

“They won’t shoot him down,” said Gunnar quickly. “They would but I’ve set it for a distress call at the coordinate location. They’ll try to trap him.

“That’s not easy,” he added, “but I think it’ll work. It’s a kind of paradox, but there’s an override. I’ve slowed him down as much as I can without shutting him off altogether, he may last, and I’ve tried to put in some indication of where we are and where we’re headed but it’s not equipped for that; I can’t send out a Standard call or
they'll
come and pick him up, I mean the others, of course, they must have this section pretty well under control or they wouldn’t be sending loners around here. And of course the heat burst registered, but they’ll think it’s him; he did say—”

“Why don’t you write it, you bastard?” said Machine. “Write?” said Gunnar.

“Write it on a piece of paper,” said Machine. “Do you know what paper is? He has it in his pack. That stuff he uses for drawing is paper. Write on it!”

“I don’t have anything to write with,” said Gunnar.

“You stupid bastard,” said Machine slowly, turning Raydos’s pack upside down so that everything fell out of it: pens, black stuff, packets of things taped together, food, a kind of hinged manuscript, all the medicine. “You stupid, electronic bastard,” he said, ripping a sheet from the manuscript, “this is paper. And this” (holding it out) “is artist’s charcoal. Take the charcoal and write on the paper. If you know how to write.”

“That’s unnecessary,” said Gunnar, but he took the writing materials, removed his gloves and wrote laboriously on the paper, his hands shaking a little. He did not seem to be used to writing.

“Now tape it to the wall,” said Machine. “No, the inside wall. Thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for your heroism. Thank you for your stupidity. Thank you—”

“I’ll kill you!” cried Gunnar. Alyx threw up her arm and cracked him under the chin. He gasped and stumbled back. She turned to Machine. “You too,” she said, “you too. Now finish it.” Gunnar climbed half inside the bubble again and commenced clumsily making some last adjustments on the bank of instruments that hung in the air. The sun was setting: a short day. She watched the snow turn ruddy, ruddy all around, the fingerprints and smears on the bubble gone in a general, faint glow as the light diffused and failed, the sun sank, the man inside—who looked dead—wobbled back and forth as Gunnar’s weight changed the balance of the delicate little ship. It looked like an ornament almost, something to set on top of a spire, someone’s pearl.

“Is he dead?” said Alyx. Machine shook his head. “Frozen,” he said. “We all have it in the packs. Slows you down. He may last.”

“His eyes?” said Alyx.

“Why, I didn’t think you cared,” said Machine, trying to make it light.

"His eyes!”

Machine shrugged a little uncomfortably. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said, “but” (here he laughed) “one would think you were in love with the man.”

“I don’t know him,” said Alyx. “I never knew him.”

“Then why all the fuss, Tiny?” he said.

“You don’t have a word for it.”

“The hell I don’t!” said Machine somewhat brutally. “I have words for everything. So the man was what we call an artist. All right. He used color on flat. So what? He can use sound. He can use things you stick your fingers into and they give you a jolt. He can use wires. He can use textures. He can use pulse-beats. He can use things that climb over you while you close your eyes. He can use combinations of drugs. He can use direct brain stimulation. He can use hypnosis. He can use things you walk on barefoot for all I care. It’s all respectable; if he gets stuck in a little backwater of his field, that’s his business; he can get out of it.”

“Put his sketches in with him,” said Alyx.

“Why?” said Machine.

“Because you don’t have a word for it,” she said. He shrugged, a little sadly. He riffled the book that had come from Raydos’s pack, tearing out about half of it, and passed the sheets in to Gunnar. They were taped to Raydos’s feet.

“Hell, he can still do a lot of things,” said Machine, trying to smile.

“Yes,” said Alyx, “and you will come out of this paralyzed from the neck down.” He stopped smiling.