Alyx - Joanna Russ (22 page)

“Help!” said Alyx. He closed the suits. He leaned on his elbows. He said “I like you. I like you too much. I’m sorry.” His face was wet to her touch: snow, tears or sweat. He said “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. We’ll do it again.”

“Oh no, no, no,” she whispered weakly.

“Yes, don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll control myself, it’s not fair. No technique.”

“If you use any more technique,” she managed to get out, “there’ll be nothing left of me in the morning but a pair of gloves and a small, damp spot.”

“Don’t lie,” said Machine calmly.

She shook her head. She plucked at his arms, trying to bring his full weight down on her, but he remained propped on his elbows, regarding her face intently. Finally he said:

“Is that pleasure?”

“Is what?” whispered Alyx.

“Is it a pleasure,” he said slowly, “or is it merely some detestable intrusion, some unbearable invasion, this being picked up and shaken, this being helpless and—and smashed and shattered into pieces when somebody lights a fuse at the: bottom of one’s brain!”

“It was pleasure for me,” said Alyx softly.

“Was it the same for you?”

She nodded.

“I hate it,” he said abruptly. “It was never like this before. Not like this. I hate it and I hate you.”

She only nodded again. He watched her somberly.

“I think,” he added finally, “that one doesn’t like it or dislike it; one loves it. That is, something picked me up by the neck and pushed me into you. Ergo, I love you.”

“I know,” she said.

“It was not what I wanted.”

“I know.” She added, “It gets easier.” He looked at her again; again she tried to pull him down. Then he remarked “We’ll see,” and smiled a little; he closed his eyes and smiled. He let his whole weight down on her carefully, saying, “You’ll have to scramble out when I get too heavy, Tiny.”

“Will.”

“And tomorrow night,” he added grimly, “I’ll tell you the story of my life.”

“Nice,” she said, “yes, oh that will be. . .nice. . .’’and she sank down deliciously into a sleep of feathers, into the swan’s-down and duck’s-down and peacock’s-down that made up the snow of Paradise, into the sleep and snow of Paradise . . .

The next day Paradise threw hell at them. It was the first real weather. It began with fat, heavy flakes just before dawn so that Gavrily (who had taken the dawn watch) was half buried himself and had to dig out some of the sleepers before he could rouse them; they were so used to the feeling of the stuff against their faces or leaking into their hoods and up their arms that they slept right through it. It turned colder as they ate breakfast, standing around and stamping and brushing themselves; then the snow got smaller and harder and then the first wind blasted around an outcropping of rock. It threw Alyx flat on her back. Gunnar said expressionlessly “You’re smaller than we are.” The others immediately huddled together. Goggles had not been packed with their equipment. They started out with the wind slamming them from side to side as if they had been toys, changing direction every few seconds and driving into their feces and down their necks stinging grains of rice. Gunnar insisted they were in a pass. They stumbled and fell more often than not, unable to see ten feet on either side, reaching in front of them, holding on to each other and sometimes falling onto hands and knees. Gunnar had faced away from the wind and was holding with both bare hands onto a map he had made from some of Raydos’s things. He said “This is the pass.” One of the nuns slipped and sprained her back. Gunnar was holding the map close to his eyes, moving it from side to side as if trying to puzzle something out. He said again:

“This is the pass. What are you waiting for?”

“What do you think, you flit!” snapped Iris. She was on one side of the sister and Gavrily on the other, trying to haul the woman to her feet. Gunnar opened his mouth again. Before he could speak, Alyx was at him (clawing at the bottom of his jacket to keep from falling in the wind) and crushing the map into a ball in his hand. “All right, all right!” she shouted through the snow, “it’s the pass. Machine, come on,” and the three of them plodded ahead, feeling and scrambling over hidden rocks, up a slope they could not see, veiled in snow that whipped about and rammed them, edging on their hands and knees around what seemed like a wall.

Then the wind stopped and Machine disappeared at the same time. She could not see where he had gone for a moment; then the wind returned—at their backs—and blasted the snow clear for a moment, hurrying it off the rock wall in sheets and revealing what looked like a well in the rock and a great, flattened slide of snow near it. It looked as if something had been dragged across it. Then the snow swept back, leaving only a dark hole.

“Chimney!” said Gunnar. Alyx flung herself on the ground and began to inch towards the dark hole in the snow. “I can’t see,” she said. She went as close as she dared. Gunnar stood back at a little distance, bracing himself against the wall. She risked lifting one hand to wave him closer, but he did not move. “Gunnar!” she shouted. He began to move slowly towards her, hugging the wall;

then he stopped where the wall appeared to stop, taking from inside his glove the crumpled map and examining it, bracing himself automatically as the wind rocked him back and forth, and tracing something on the map with one finger as if there were something that puzzled him.

“Gunnar,” said Alyx, flattening herself against the ground, “Gunnar, this hole is too broad for me. I can’t climb down it.” Gunnar did not move.

“Gunnar,” said Alyx desperately, “you’re a mountain climber. You’re an expert. You can climb down.”

He raised his eyes from the map and looked at her without interest.

“You can climb down it,” continued Alyx, digging her fingers into the snow. “You can tie a rope to him and then you can climb up and we’ll pull him up.”

“Well, I don’t think so,” he said. He came a little closer, apparently not at all bothered by the wind, and peered into the hole; then he repeated in a tone of finality, “No, I don’t think so.”

“You’ve got to,” said Alyx. He balled up the map again and put it back into his glove. He had turned and was beginning to plod back towards the place where they had left the others, bent halfway into the wind, when she shouted his name and he stopped. He came back and looked into the hole with his hands clasped behind his back; then he said:

“Well, I don’t think I’ll try that.”

“He’s dying,” said Alyx.

“No, I think that’s a little risky,” Gunnar added reasonably. He continued to look into the hole. “I’ll let you down,” he said finally. “Is that all right?”

“Yes, that’s all right,” said Alyx, shutting her eyes. She considered kicking him or tripping him so that he’d fall in himself but he was keeping a very prudent distance from the edge, and besides, there was no telling where he would fall or how badly Machine was hurt. He might fall on Machine. She said, “That’s fine, thanks.” She rolled over and half sat up, slipping off her pack; clinging to it, she got out the length of rope they all carried and tied it under her arms. She was very clumsy in the wind; Gunnar watched her without offering to help, and when she was finished he took the free end and held it laxly in one hand. “Your weight won’t be too much,” he said.

“Gunnar,” she said, “hold that thing right.” He shook himself a little and took a better hold on the rope. Coming closer, he said “Wait a minute,” rummaged in her pack and handed her a kind of bulb which she tucked into her sleeve. It looked like the medicine he had once shown her, the kind they had used on Raydos. He said “Put it in the crook of his arm and press it. A little at a time.” She nodded, afraid to speak to him. She crawled toward the edge of the well where the snow had suddenly collapsed under Machine, and throwing her arms over the ground, let herself down into the dark. The rope held and Gunnar did not let go. She imagined that he would wait for her to shout and then throw down his own rope; she wrapped her arms around her head for the hole was too wide for her to brace herself and she spun slowly around—or rather, the walls did, hitting her now and then—until the chimney narrowed. She climbed part of the way down, arms and legs wide as if crucified. She had once seen an acrobat roll on a wheel that way. The darkness seemed to lighten a little and she thought she could see something light at the bottom, so she shouted “Gunnar!” up the shaft. As she had expected, a coil of rope came whispering down, settled about her shoulders, slid off to one side and hung about her like a necklace, the free end dangling down into the half-dark.

But when she pulled at it, she found that the other end was fastened under her own arms.

She did not think. She was careful about that. She descended further, to where Machine lay wedged like a piece of broken goods, his eyes shut, one arm bent at an unnatural angle, his head covered with blood. She could not get at his pack because it was under him. She found a kind of half-shelf next to him that she could stay on by bracing her feet against the opposite wall, and sitting there, she took from her sleeve the bulb Gunnar had given her. She could not get at either of Machine’s arms without moving him, for the other one was twisted under him and jammed against the rock, but she knew that a major blood vessel was in the crook of the arm, so she pressed the nose of the bulb against a vessel in his neck and squeezed the bulb twice. Nothing happened. She thought:
Gumar has gone to get the others.
She squeezed the medicine again and then was afraid, because it might be too much; someone had said “I’ve given Raydos all he can take”; so she put the thing back in her sleeve. Her legs ached. She could just about reach Machine. She took off a glove and put one hand in front of his mouth to satisfy herself that he was breathing, and then she tried feeling for a pulse in his throat and got something cold, possibly from the medicine bottle. But he had a pulse. His eyes remained closed. In her own pack was a time-telling device called a watch—she supposed vaguely that they called it that from the watches they had to keep at night, or perhaps they called it that for some other reason—but that was up top. She could not get to it. She began to put her weight first on one leg and then on the other, to rest a little, and then she found she could move closer to Machine, who still lay with his face upward, his eyes shut. He had fallen until the narrow part of the chimney stopped him. She was beginning to be able to see better and she touched his face with her bare hand; then she tried to feel about his head, where he was hurt, where the blood that came out increased ever so little, every moment, steadily black and black. The light was very dim. She felt gashes but nothing deep; she thought it must have been a blow or something internal in the body, so she put the medicine bulb to his neck again and squeezed it. Nothing happened.
They'll be back,
she thought. She looked at the bottle but could not see well enough to tell what was written on it so she put it back into her sleeve. It occurred to her then that they had never taught her to read, although they had taught her to speak. Lines came into her mind,
We are done for if we fall asleep,
something she must have heard; for she was growing numb and beginning to fall asleep, or not sleep exactly but some kind of retreat, and the dim, squirming walls around her began to close in and draw back, the way things do when one can barely see. She put both hands on Machine’s face where the blood had begun to congeal in the cold, drew them over his face, talked to him steadily to keep herself awake, talked to him to wake him up. She thought
He has concussion,
the word coming from somewhere in that hypnotic hoard they had put into her head. She began to nod and woke with a jerk. She said softly “What’s your name?” but Machine did not move. “No, tell me your name,” she persisted gently, “tell me your name,” drawing her hands over his face, unable to feel from the knees down, trying not to sink into sleep, passing her fingers through his hair while she nodded with sleep, talking to him, whispering against his cheek, feeling again and again for his hurts, trying to move her legs and coming close enough to him to see his face in the dim, dim light; to put her hands against his cheeks and speak to him in her own language, wondering why she should mind so much that he was dying, she who had had three children and other men past counting, wondering how there could be so much to these people and so little, so much and so little, like the coat of snow that made everything seem equal, both the up and the down, like the blowing snow that hid the most abysmal poverty and the precious things down under the earth. She jerked awake. Snow was sifting down on her shoulders and something snaky revolved in the air above her.

But Machine had stopped breathing some time before.

She managed to wind her own rope loosely around her neck and climb the other by bracing herself against the side of the well: not as smoothly as she liked, for the rope wavered a little and tightened unsteadily while Alyx cursed and shouted up to them to mind their bloody business if they didn’t want to get it in a few minutes. Gavrily pulled her up over the edge.

“Well?” he said. She was blinking. The four others were all on the rope. She smiled at them briefly, slapping her gloves one against the other. Her hands were rubbed raw. The wind, having done its job, had fallen, and the snow fell straight as silk sheets.

“Well?” said Gavrily again, anxiously, and she shook her head. She could see on the faces of all of them a strange expression, a kind of mixed look as if they did not know what to feel or show. Of course; they had not liked him. She jerked her head towards the pass. Gavrily looked as if he were about to say something, and Iris as if she were about to cry suddenly, but Alyx only shook her head again and started off behind Gunnar. She saw one of the nuns looking back fearfully at the hole. They walked for a while and then Alyx took Gunnar’s arm, gently holding on to the unresponsive arm of the big, big man, her lips curling back over her teeth on one side, involuntarily, horribly. She said:

“Gunnar, you did well.”

He said nothing.

“You ought to have lived in my country,” she said. “Oh yes! you would have been a hero there.”