On the twenty-ninth afternoon Maudey died. She died suddenly and by accident. They were into the pass that Gunnar had spoken of, half blinded by the glare of ice on the rock walls to either side, following a path that dropped almost sheer from the left. It was wide enough for two or three and Machine had charge of Maudey that day, for although her nervous fits had grown less frequent, they had never entirely gone away. He walked on the outside, she on the inside. Behind them Iris was humming softly to herself. It was icy in parts and the going was slow. They stopped for a moment and Machine cautiously let go of Maudey’s arm; at the same time Iris began to sing softly, the same drab tune over and over again, the way she had said to Alyx they danced at the drug palaces, over and over to put themselves into trances, over and over.

“Stop that filthy song,” said Maudey. “I’m tired.”

Iris continued insultingly to sing.

“I’m tired!” said Maudey desperately, “I’m tired! I’m tired!” and in turning she slipped and fell on the slippery path to her knees. She was still in balance, however. Iris had arched her eyebrows and was silently mouthing something when Machine, who had been watching Maudey intently, bent down to take hold of her, but at that instant Maudey’s whole right arm threw itself out over nothing and she fell over the side of the path. Machine flung himself after her and was only stopped from falling over in his turn by fetching up against someone’s foot—it happened to be one of the nuns—and they both went down, teetering for a moment over the side. The nun was sprawled on the path in a patch of gravel and Machine hung shoulders down over the verge. They pulled him back and got the other one to her feet.

“Well, what happened?” said Iris in surprise. Alyx had grabbed Gunnar by the arm. Iris shrugged at them all elaborately and sat down, her chin on her knees, while Alyx got the rope from all the packs as swiftly as possible, knotted it, pushed the nun off the patch of dry gravel and set Machine on it. “Can you hold him?” she said. Machine nodded. She looped the rope about a projecting point in the wall above them and gave it to Machine; the other end she knotted under Gunnar’s arms. They sent him down to bring Maudey up, which he did, and they laid her down on the path. She was dead.

“Well, how is she?” said Iris, looking at them all over her shoulder.

“She’s dead,” said Alyx.

“That,” said Iris brightly, “is not the right answer,” and she came over to inspect things for herself, coquettishly twisting and untwisting a lock of her straight silver hair. She knelt by the body. Maudey’s head lay almost flat against her shoulder for her neck was broken; her eyes were wide open. Alyx closed them, saying again “Little girl, she’s dead.” Iris looked away, then up at them, then down again. She made a careless face. She said “Mo—Maudey was old, you know; d’you think they can fix her when we get back?”

“She is dead,” said Alyx. Iris was drawing lines in the snow. She shrugged and looked covertly at the body, then she turned to it and her face began to change; she moved nearer on her knees. “Mo—Mother,” she said, then grabbed at the woman with the funny, twisted neck, screaming the word “Mother!” over and over, grabbing at the clothing and the limbs and even the purple hair where the hood had fallen back, screaming without stopping. Machine said quickly, “I can put her out.” Alyx shook her head. She put one hand over Iris’s mouth to muffle the noise. She sat with the great big girl as Iris threw herself on top of dead Maudey, trying to burrow into her, her screaming turning to sobbing, great gasping sobs that seemed to dislocate her whole body, just as vanity and age had thrown her mother about so terribly between them and had finally thrown her over a cliff. As soon as the girl began to cry, Alyx put both arms about her and rocked with her, back and forth. One of the nuns came up with a thing in her hand, a white pill.

“It would be unkind,” said the nun, “it would be most unkind, most unkind—”

“Go to hell,” said Alyx in Greek.

“I must insist,” said the nun softly, “I must, must insist,” in a tangle of hisses like a snake. “I must, must, I must—”

“Get out!” shouted Alyx to the startled woman, who did not even understand the words. With her arms around Iris, big as Iris was, with little Iris in agonies, Alyx talked to her in Greek, soothed her in Greek, talked just to be talking, rocked her back and forth. Finally there came a moment when Iris stopped.

Everyone looked very surprised.

“Your mother,” said Alyx, carefully pointing to the body, “is dead.” This provoked a fresh outburst. Three more times. Four times. Alyx said it again. For several hours she repeated the whole thing, she did not know how often, holding the girl each time, then holding only her hand, then finally drawing her to her feet and away from the dead woman while the men took the food and equipment out of Maudey’s pack to divide it among themselves and threw the body over the path, to hide it. There was a kind of tittering, whispering chatter behind Alyx. She walked all day with the girl, talking to her, arm clumsily about her, making her walk while she shook with fits of weeping, making her walk when she wanted to sit down, making her walk as she talked of her mother, of running away from home—“not like you did” said Iris—of hating her, loving her, hating her, being reasonable, being rational, being grown up, fighting (“but it’s natural!”), not being able to stand her, being able to stand her, loving her, always fighting with her (and here a fresh fit of weeping) and then—then—

“I killed her!” cried Iris, stock-still on the path.

“Oh my God, I killed her! I! I!”

“Bullshit,” said Alyx shortly, her hypnotic vocabulary coming to the rescue at the eleventh instant.

“But I did, I did,” said Iris. “Didn’t you see? I upset her, I made—”

“Ass!” said Alyx.

“Then why didn’t you rope them together,” cried Iris, planting herself hysterically in front of Alyx, arms akimbo, “why didn’t you? You knew she could fall! You wanted to kill her!”

“If you say that again—” said Alyx, getting ready.

“I see it, I see it,” whispered Iris wildly, putting her arms around herself, her eyes narrowing. “Yesss, you wanted her dead—you didn’t want the trouble—”

Alyx hit her across the face. She threw her down, sat on her and proceeded to pound at her while the others watched, shocked and scandalized. She took good care not to hurt her. When Iris had stopped, she rubbed snow roughly over the girl’s face and hauled her to her feet, “and no more trouble out of you!” she said.

“I’m all right,” said Iris uncertainly. She took a step. “Yes,” she said. Alyx did not hold her any more but walked next to her, giving her a slight touch now and then when she seemed to waver.

“Yes, I am all right,” said Iris. Then she added, in her normal voice, “I know Maudey is dead.”

“Yes,” said Alyx.

“I know,” said Iris, her voice wobbling a little, “that you didn’t put them together because they both would have gone over.”

She added, “I am going to cry.”

“Cry away,” said Alyx, and the rest of the afternoon Iris marched steadily ahead, weeping silently, trying to mop her face and her nose with the cleaning cloth Alyx had given her, breaking out now and again into suppressed, racking sobs. They camped for the night in a kind of hollow between two rising slopes with Iris jammed securely into the middle of everybody and Alyx next to her. In the dim never-dark of the snow fields, long after everyone else had fallen asleep, someone brushed Alyx across the face, an oddly unctuous sort of touch, at once gentle and unpleasant. She knew at once who it was.

“If you do not,” she said, “take that devil’s stuff out of here at once—!” The hand withdrew.

“I must insist,” said the familiar whisper, “I must, must insist. You do not understand—it is not—”

“If you touch her,” said Alyx between her teeth, “I will kill you—both of you—and I will take those little pills you are so fond of and defecate upon each and every one of them, upon my soul I swear that I will!”

“But—but—” She could feel the woman trembling with shock.

“If you so much as touch her,” said Alyx, “you will have caused me to commit two murders and a sacrilege. Now get out!” and she got up in the dim light, pulled the pack off every grunting, protesting sleeper’s back—except the two women who had withdrawn to a little distance together—and piled them like a barricade around Iris, who was sleeping with her face to the stars and her mouth open. Let them trip over that, she thought vindictively. Damn it! Damn them all! Boots without spikes, damn them! What do they expect us to do, swim over the mountains? She did not sleep for a long time, and when she did it seemed that everyone was climbing over her, stepping on top of her and sliding off just for fun. She dreamed she was what Gunnar had described as a ski-slide. Then she dreamed that the first stepped on to her back and then the second on to his and so on and so on until they formed a human ladder, when the whole snow-field slowly tilted upside down. Everyone fell off. She came to with a start; it was Gavrily, waking her for the dawn watch. She saw him fall asleep in seconds, then trudged a little aside and sat cross-legged, her bow on her knees. The two nuns had moved back to the group, asleep, sprawled out and breathing softly with the others. She watched the sky lighten to the left, become transparent, take on color. Pale blue. Winter blue.

“All right,” she said, “everyone up!” and slipped off her pack for the usual handfuls of breakfast food.

The first thing she noticed, with exasperation, was that Raydos had stolen back his art equipment, for it was gone. The second was that there were only six figures sitting up and munching out of their cupped hands, not seven; she thought that’s right, Maudey’s dead, then ran them over in her head: Gunnar, Gavrily, Raydos, Machine, the Twins, Iris—

But Iris was missing.

Her first thought was that the girl had somehow been spirited away, or made to disappear by The Holy Twins, who had stopped eating with their hands halfway to their mouths, like people about to pour a sacrifice of grain on to the ground for Mother Earth. Both of them were watching her. Her second thought was unprintable and almost—but not quite—unspeakable, and so instantaneous that she had leapt into the circle of breakfasters before she half knew where she was, shoving their packs and themselves out of her way. She dislodged one of Raydos’s eye lenses; he clapped his hand to his eye and began to grope in the snow. “What the devil—” said Gunnar.

Iris was lying on her back among the packs, looking up into the sky. She had shut one eye and the other was moving up and down in a regular pattern. Alyx fell over her. When she scrambled to her knees, Iris had not moved and her one open eye still made the regular transit of nothing, up and down, up and down.

“Iris,” said Alyx.

“Byootiful,” said Iris. Alyx shook her. “Byootiful,” crooned the girl, “all byootiful” and very slowly she opened her closed eye, shut the other and began again to scan the something or nothing up in the sky, up and down, up and down. Alyx tried to pull the big girl to her feet, but she was too heavy; then with astonishing lightness Iris herself sat up, put her head to one side and looked at Alyx with absolute calm and complete relaxation. It seemed to Alyx that the touch of one finger would send her down on her back again. “Mother,” said Iris clearly, opening both eyes, “mother. Too lovely,” and she continued to look at Alyx as she had at the sky. She bent her head down on to one shoulder, as Maudey’s head had been bent in death.

“Mother is lovely,” said Iris conversationally. “There she is. You are lovely. Here you are. He is lovely. There he is. She is lovely. We are lovely. They are lovely. I am lovely. Love is lovely. Lovely lovely lovely lovely—” she went on talking to herself as Alyx stood up. One of the nuns came walking across the trampled snow with her hands clasped nervously in front of her; she came up to the little woman and took a breath; then she said:

“You may kill me if you like.”

“I love shoes,” said Iris, lying down on her back, “I love sky. I love clouds. I love hair. I love zippers. I love food. I love my mother. I love feet. I love bathrooms. I love walking. I love people. I love sleep. I love breathing. I love tape. I love books. I love pictures. I love air. I love rolls. I love hands. I love—”

“Shut up!” shouted Alyx, as the girl continued with her inexhaustible catalogue; “Shut up, for God’s sake!” and turned away, only to find herself looking up at the face of the nun, who had quickly moved about to be in front of her and who still repeated, “You may kill us both if you like,” with an unbearable mixture of nervousness and superiority. Iris had begun to repeat the word “love” over and over and over again in a soft, unchanging voice.

“Is this not kinder?” said the nun.

“Go away before I kill you!” said Alyx.

“She is happy,” said the nun.

“She is an idiot!”

“She will be happy for a day,” said the nun, “and then less happy and then even less happy, but she will have her memory of the All and when sadness comes back—as it will in a day or so, I am sorry to say, but some day we will find out how—”

“Get out!” said Alyx.

“However, it will be an altered sadness,” continued the nun rapidly, “an eased sadness with the All in its infinite All—”

“Get out of here before I alter you into the All!” Alyx shouted, losing control of herself. The nun hurried away and Alyx, clapping both hands over her ears, walked rapidly away from Iris, who had begun to say “I’ve been to the moon but you won’t. I’ve been to the sun but you won’t, I’ve been to—” and over and over and over again with ascending and descending variations.

“Messing up the machinery,” said Machine, next to her.

“Leave me alone,” said Alyx, her hands still over her ears. The ground had unaccountably jumped up and was swimming in front of her; she knew she was crying.

“I don’t approve of messing up the machinery,” said Machine softly. “I have a respect for the machinery; I do not like to see it abused and if they touch the girl again you need not kill them. I will.”

“No killing,” said Alyx, as levelly as she could.

“Religion?” said Machine sarcastically.

“No,” said Alyx, lifting her head abruptly, “but no killing. Not my people.” She turned to go, but he caught her gently by the arm, looking into her face with a half-mocking smile, conveying somehow by his touch that her arm was not inside an insulated suit but was bare, and that he was stroking it. The trip had given him back his eyebrows and eyelashes; the hair on his head was a wiry black brush; for Machine did not, apparently, believe in tampering irreversibly with the Machinery. She thought I won’t get involved with any of these people. She found herself saying idiotically “Your hair’s growing in.” He smiled and took her other arm, holding her as if he were going to lift her off the ground, she hotter and dizzier every moment, feeling little, feeling light, feeling like a woman who has had no luxury for a long, long time. She said, “Put me down, if you please.”

“Tiny, he said, “you are down,” and putting his hands around her waist, he lifted her easily to the height of his face. “I think you will climb it,” he said.

“No,” said Alyx. It did not seem to bother him to keep holding her up in the air.

“I think you will,” he said, smiling, and still smiling, he kissed her with a sort of dispassionate, calm pleasure, taking his time, holding her closely and carefully, using the thoughtful, practiced, craftsmanly thoroughness that Machine brought to everything that Machine did. Then he put her down and simply walked away.

“Ah, go find someone your own size!” she called after him, but then she remembered that the only girl his size was Iris, and that Iris was lying on her back in the snow in a world where everything was lovely, lovely, lovely due to a little white pill. She swore. She could see Iris in the distance, still talking. She took a knife out of her sleeve and tried the feel of it but the feel was wrong, just as the boots attached to their suits had no spikes, just as their maps stopped at Base B, just as Paradise itself had turned into—but no, that was not so. The place was all right, quite all right. The place, she thought, is all right. She started back to the group of picnickers who were slipping their packs back on and stamping the snow off their boots; some were dusting off the rear ends of others where they had sat in the snow. She saw one of The Heavenly Twins say something in Iris’s ear and Iris get obediently to her feet, still talking; then the other nun said something and Iris’s mouth stopped moving.

Bury it deep, thought Alyx, never let it heal. She joined them, feeling like a mule-driver.

“D’you know,” said Gunnar conversationally, “that we’ve been out here thirty days? Not bad, eh?”

“I’ll say!” said Gavrily.

“And only one death,” said Alyx sharply, “not bad, eh?”

“That’s not our fault,” said Gavrily. They were all staring at her.

“No,” she said, “it’s not our fault. It’s mine.”

“Come on,” she added.

On the thirty-second day Paradise still offered them the semblance of a path, though Gunnar could not find his mountain pass and grew scared and irritable trying to lead them another way. Paradise tilted and zigzagged around them. At times they had to sit down, or slide down, or even crawl, and he waited for them with deep impatience, telling them haughtily how a professional would be able to handle this sort of thing without getting down on his-to go down a slope. Alyx said nothing. Iris spoke to nobody. Only Gavrily talked incessantly about People’s Capitalism, as if he had been stung by a bug, explaining at great and unnecessary length how the Government was a check on the Military, the Military was a check on Government, and both were a check on Business which in turn checked the other two. He called it the three-part system of checks and balances. Alyx listened politely. Finally she said:

“What’s a—?”

Gavrily explained, disapprovingly.

“Ah,” said Alyx, smiling.

Iris still said nothing.

They camped early for the night, sprawled about a narrow sort of table-land, as far away from each other as they could get and complaining loudly. The sun had not been down for fifteen minutes and there was still light in the sky: rose, lavender, yellow, apple-green, violet. It made a beautiful show. It was getting extremely cold. Gunnar insisted that they could go on, in spite of their complaints; he clenched his big hands and ordered them to get up (which they did not do); then he turned to Alyx.

“You too,” he said. “You can go on for another hour.”

“I’d prefer not to go on in the dark,” she said. She was lying down with her hands under her head, watching the colors in the sky.

“There’s light enough to last us all night!” he said.

“Will you come on?”

“No,” said Alyx.

“God damn it!” he said, “do you think I don’t know what I’m doing? Do you think I don’t know where I’m taking you? You lazy sons of bitches, get up!”

“That’s enough,” said Alyx, half on her feet.

“Oh no it isn’t,” he said. “Oh no it isn’t! You all get up, all of you! You’re not going to waste the hour that’s left!”

“I prefer,” said Alyx quietly, “not to sleep with my head wedged in a chasm, if you don’t mind.” She rose to her feet.

“Do I have to kick you in the stomach again?” she said calmly.

Gunnar was silent. He stood with his hands balled into fists.

“Do I?” she said. “Do I have to kick you in the groin? Do I have to gouge your eyes out?”

“Do I have to dive between your legs and throw you head foremost on the rocks so you’re knocked out?” she said.

“So your nose gets broken?

“So your cheekbones get bloody and your chin bruised?”

She turned to the others.

“I suggest that we keep together,” she said, “to take advantage of each other’s warmth; otherwise you are bound to stiffen up as you get colder; it is going to be a devil of a night.”

She joined the others as they packed snow about themselves—it was more like frozen dust than snow, and there was not much of it; they were too high up—and settled in against Iris, who was unreadable, with the beautiful sky above them dying into deep rose, into dusty rose, into dirty rose. She did not look at Gunnar. She felt sorry for him. He was to take the first watch anyway, though (she thought) what we are watching for I do not know and what we could do if we saw it, God only knows. And then what I am watching for…. What I would do…. No food…. Too high up…. No good….

She woke under the night sky, which was brilliant with stars: enormous, shining, empty, and cold. The stars were unrecognizable, not constellations she knew any more but planes upon planes, shifting trapezoids, tilted pyramids like the mountains themselves, all reaching off into spaces she could not even begin to comprehend: distant suns upon suns. The air was very cold.

Someone was gently shaking her, moving her limbs, trying to untangle her from the mass of human bodies. She said, “Lemme sleep” and tried to turn over. Then she felt a shocking draught at her neck and breast and a hand inside her suit; she said sleepily, “Oh dear, it’s too cold.”

“You had better get up,” whispered Machine reasonably. “I believe I’m standing on somebody.”

“I’m trying not to,” he added solemnly, “but everyone’s so close together that it’s rather difficult.”

Alyx giggled. The sound startled her. Well, I’ll talk to you, she said. No, she thought, I didn’t say it, did I? She articulated clearly “I—will—talk—to you,” and sat up, leaning her head against his knee to wake up. She pushed his hand away and closed up her suit. “I’m cross,” she said, “you hear that?”

“I hear and obey,” whispered Machine, grinning, and taking her up in his arms like a baby, he carried her through the mass of sleepers, picking his way carefully, for they were indeed packed very close together. He set her down a little distance away.

“You’re supposed to be on watch,” she protested. He shook his head. He knelt beside her and pointed to the watch—Gunnar—some fifteen meters away. A noble figure, thought Alyx. She began to laugh uncontrollably, muffling her mouth on her knees. Machine’s shoulders were shaking gleefully. He scooped her up with one arm and walked her behind a little wall of snow someone had built, a little wall about one meter high and three meters long—

“Did you—?” said Alyx.

“I did,” said the young man. He reached out with one forefinger and rapidly slid it down the opening of her suit from her neck to her—

“Eeeey, it’s too cold!” cried Alyx, rolling away and pressing the opening shut again.

“Sssh!” he said. “No it’s not.”

“He’ll see us,” said Alyx, straightening out distrustfully.

“No he won’t.”

“Yes he will.”

“No he won’t.”

“Yes he will!” and she got up, shook the snow off herself, and immediately started away. Machine did not move.

“Well, aren’t you—” she said, nettled.

He shook his head. He sat down, crossed his legs in some unaccountable fashion so the feet ended up on top, crossed his arms, and sat immobile as an Oriental statue. She came back and sat next to him, resting her head against him (as much as she could with one of his knees in the way), feeling soulful, trustful, silly. She could feel him chuckling. “How do you do that with the feet?” she said. He wriggled his toes inside his boots.

“I dare not do anything else,” he said, “because of your deadly abilities with groin-kicking, eye-gouging, head-cracking and the like, Agent.”

“Oh, shut up!” said Alyx. She put her arms around him. He uncrossed his own arms, then used them to carefully uncross his legs, then lay down with her in the snow, insulated suit to insulated suit, kissing her time after time. Then he stopped.

“You’re scared, aren’t you?” he whispered.

She nodded.

“Goddammit, I’ve had men before!” she whispered. He put his finger over her lips. With the other hand he pressed together the ends of the thongs that could hold a suit loosely together at the collarbone—first his suit, then hers—and then, with the same hand, rapidly opened both suits from the neck in front to the base of the spine in back and ditto with the long underwear: “Ugly but useful,” he remarked. Alyx began to giggle again. She tried to press against him, shivering with cold. “Wait!” he said, “and watch, O Agent,” and very carefully, biting one lip, he pressed together the right-hand edges of both suits and then the left, making for the two of them a personal blanket, a double tent, a spot of warmth under the enormous, starry sky.

“And they don’t,” he said triumphantly, “come apart by pulling. They only come apart by prying! And see? You can move your arms and legs in! Isn’t it marvelous?” And he gave her a proud kiss—a big, delighted, impersonal smack on the cheek. Alyx began to laugh. She laughed as she pulled her arms and legs in to hug him; she laughed as he talked to her, as he buried his face in her neck, as he began to caress her; she laughed until her laughter turned to sobbing under his expert hands, his too-expert hands, his calm deliberateness; she raked his back with her fingernails; she screamed at him to hurry up and called him a pig and an actor and the son of a whore (for these epithets were of more or less equal value in her own country); and finally, when at his own good time the stars exploded—and she realized that nova meant—that nova meant (though she had closed her eyes a long time before)—someone had said nova the other day—she came to herself as if rocking in the shallows of a prodigious tide, yawning, lazily extending her toes—and with a vague but disquieting sense of having done something or said something she should not have said or done. She knew she hated him there, for a while; she was afraid she might have hurt him or hurt his feelings.

“What language were you speaking?” said Machine with interest.

“Greek!” said Alyx, and she laughed with relief and would have kissed him, only it was really too much effort.

He shook her. “Don’t go to sleep,” he said.

“Mmmm.”

“Don’t go to sleep!” and he shook her harder.

“Why not?” she said.

“Because,” said Machine, “I am going to begin again.”

“All right,” said Alyx complaisantly and raised her knees. He began, as before, to kiss her neck, her shoulders and so on down et cetera et cetera, in short to do everything he had done before on the same schedule until it occurred to her that he was doing everything just as he had done it before and on the same schedule, until she tried to push him away, exclaiming angrily, feeling like a statuette or a picture, frightened and furious. At first he would not stop; finally she bit him.

“What the devil is the matter!” he cried.

“You,” she said, “stop it. Let me out.” They had been together and now they were sewed up in a sack; it was awful; she started to open the jointure of the suits but he grabbed her hands.

“What is it?” he said, “what is it? Don’t you want it? Don’t you see that I’m trying?”

“Trying?” said Alyx stupidly.

“Yes, trying! he said vehemently. “Trying! Do you think that comes by nature?”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I’m sorry.” They lay silently for a few minutes.

“I was trying,” he said in a thick, bitter voice, “to give you a good time. I like you. I did the best I could. Apparently it wasn’t good enough.”

“But I don’t—” said Alyx.

“You don’t want it,” he said; “all right,” and pushing her hands away, he began to open the suits himself. She closed them. He opened them and she closed them several times. Then he began to cry and she put her arms around him.

“I had the best time in my life,” she said. He continued to sob, silently, through clenched teeth, turning away his face.

“I had,” she repeated, “the best time in my life. I did. I did! But I don’t want—”

“All right,” he said.

“But I don’t,” she said, “I don’t want—I don’t—”

He tried to get away from her and, of course could not; he thrashed about, forgetting that the suits had to be slit and could not be pulled apart; he pushed against the material until he frightened her for she thought she was going to be hurt; finally she cried out:

“Darling, stop it! Please!”

Machine stopped, leaning on his knees and clenched fists, his face stubbornly turned away.

“It’s you I want,” she said. “D’you see? I don’t want a—performance. I want you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, more calmly.

“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Alyx reasonably.

“Look,” he said, turning his head back so that they were nose to nose, “when you do something, you do it right, don’t you?”

“No,” said Alyx promptly.

“Well, what’s the good of doing it then!” he shouted.

“Because you want to, idiot!” she snapped, “any five-year-old child—”

“Oh, now I’m a five-year-old child, am I?”

“Just a minute, just a minute, athlete! I never said—”

“Athlete! By God—”

She pinched him.

He pinched her.

She grabbed at what there was of his hair and pulled it; he howled and twisted her hand; then both of them pushed and the result was that he lost his balance and carried her over on to one side with him, the impromptu sleeping-bag obligingly going with them. They both got a faceful of snow. They wrestled silently for a few minutes, each trying to grab some part of the other, Machine muttering, Alyx kicking, Machine pushing her head down into the bag, Alyx trying to bite his finger, Machine yelling, Alyx trying to butt her head into his stomach. There was, however, no room to do anything properly. After a few minutes they stopped.

He sighed. It was rather peaceful, actually.

“Look, dear,” he said quietly, “I’ve done my best. But if you want me, myself, you’ll have to do without; I’ve heard that too often. Do you think they don’t want me out there? Sure they do! They want me to open up my” (she could not catch the word) “like a God damned” (or that one) “and show them everything that’s inside, all my feelings, or what they call feelings. I don’t believe they have feelings. They talk about their complexities and their reactions and their impressions and their interactions and their patterns and their neuroses and their childhoods and their rebellions and their utterly unspeakable insides until I want to vomit. I have no insides. I will not have any. I certainly will not let anyone see any. I do things and I do them well; that’s all: If you want that, you can have it. Otherwise, my love, I am simply not at home. Understood?”

“Understood,” she said. She took his face in her hands. “You are splendid,” she said thickly. “You are splendid and beautiful and superb. I love your performance. Perform me.”

And if I let slip any emotion, she thought, it will—thank God—be in Greek!

He performed again—rather badly. But it turned out well just the same.

When Machine had gone to take over the watch from Gunnar, Alyx returned to the sleepers. Iris was sitting up. Not only was it possible to identify her face in the starlight reflected from the snow; she had thrown back her hood in the bitter cold and her silver hair glowed uncannily. She waited until Alyx reached her; then she said:

“Talk to me.”

“Did you know I was up?” said Alyx. Iris giggled, but an uncertain, odd sort of giggle as if she were fighting for breath; she said in the same queer voice, “Yes, you woke me up. You were both shouting.”

Gunnar must know, thought Alyx and dismissed the thought. She wondered if these people were jealous. She turned to go back to her own sleeping place but Iris clutched at her arm, repeating, “Talk to me!”

“What about, love?” said Alyx.

“Tell me—tell me bad things,” said Iris, catching her breath and moving her head in the collar of her suit as if it were choking her. “Put your hood on,” said Alyx, but the girl shook her head, declaring she wanted it that way. She said, “Tell me—horrors.”

“What?” said Alyx in surprise, sitting down.

“I want to hear bad things,” said Iris monotonously. “I want to hear awful things. I can’t stand it. I keep slipping,” and she giggled again, saying “Everybody could hear you all over camp,” and then putting one hand to her face, catching her breath, and holding on to Alyx’s arm as if she were drowning. “Tell me horrors!” she cried.

“Sssh,” said Alyx, “ssssh. I’ll tell you anything you like, baby, anything you like.”

“My mother’s dead,” said Iris with sudden emotion. “My mother’s dead. I’ve got to remember that. I’ve got to!”

“Yes, yes, she’s dead,” said Alyx.

“Please, please,” said Iris, “keep me here. I keep sliding away.”

“Horrors,” said Alyx. “Good Lord, I don’t think I know any tonight.”

“It’s like feathers,” said Iris suddenly, dreamily, looking up in the sky, “it’s like pillows, it’s like air cushions under those things, you know, it’s like—like—”

“All right, all right,” said Alyx quickly, “your mother broke her neck. I’ll tell you about it again. I might as well; you’re all making me soft as wax, the whole lot of you.”

“Don’t, don’t,” said Iris, moaning. “Don’t say soft. I keep trying, I thought the cold—yes, yes, that’s good—” and with sudden decision she began to strip off her suit. Alyx grabbed her and wrestled her to the ground, fastening the suit again and shoving the hood on for good measure. She thought suddenly She’s still fighting the drug. “You touch that again and I’ll smash you,” said Alyx steadily.

“I’ll beat your damned teeth in.”

“It’s too hot,” said Iris feverishly, “too—to—” She relapsed into looking at the stars.

“Look at me,” said Alyx, grabbing her head and pulling it down. “Look at me, baby.”

“I’m not a baby,” said Iris lazily. “I’m not a—a—baby. I’m a woman.”

Alyx shook her.

“I am almost grown up,” said Iris, not bothered by her head wobbling while she was being shaken. “I am very grown up. I am thirty-three.”

Alyx dropped her hands.

“I am thirty-three already,” continued Iris, trying to focus her eyes. “I am, I am” (she said this uncomfortably, with great concentration) “and—and Ma—Machine is thirty-six and Gunnar is fifty-eight—yes, that’s right—and Maudey was my mother. She was my mother. She was ninety. But she didn’t look it. She’s dead. She didn’t look it, did she? She took that stuff. She didn’t look it.”

“Baby,” said Alyx, finding her voice, “look at me.”

“Why?” said Iris in a whisper.

“Because,” said Alyx, “I am going to tell you something horrible. Now look at me. You know what I look like. You’ve seen me in the daylight. I have lines in my face, the first lines, the ones that tell you for the first time that you’re going to die. There’s gray in my hair, just a little, just enough to see in a strong light, a little around my ears and one streak starting at my forehead. Do you remember it?”

Iris nodded solemnly.

“I am getting old,” said Alyx, “and my skin is getting coarse and tough. I tire more easily. I am withering a little. It will go faster and faster from now on and soon I will die.

“Iris,” she said with difficulty, “how old am I?”

“Fifty?” said Iris.

Alyx shook her head.

“Sixty?” said Iris hopefully.

Alyx shook her head again.

“Well, how old are you?” said Iris, a little impatiently.

“Twenty-six,” said Alyx. Iris put her hands over her eyes.

“Twenty-six,” said Alyx steadily. “Think of that, you thirty-three-year-old adolescent! Twenty-six and dead at fifty. Dead! There’s a whole world of people who live like that. We don’t eat the way you do, we don’t have whatever it is the doctors give you, we work like hell, we get sick, we lose arms or legs or eyes and nobody gives us new ones, we die in the plague, one-third of our babies die before they’re a year old and one time out of five the mother dies, too, in giving them birth.”

“But it’s so long ago!” wailed little Iris.

“Oh no it’s not,” said Alyx. “It’s right now. It’s going on right now. I lived in it and I came here. It’s in the next room. I was in that room and now I’m in this one. There are people still in that other room. They are living now. They are suffering now. And they always live and always suffer because everything keeps on happening. You can’t say it’s all over and done with because it isn’t; it keeps going on. It all keeps going on. Shall I tell you about the plague? That’s one nice thing. Shall I tell you about the fevers, the boils, the spasms, the fear, the burst blood vessels, the sores? Shall I tell you what’s going on right now, right here, right in this place?”

“Y—yes! Yes! Yes!” cried Iris, her hands over her ears. Alyx caught the hands in her own, massaging them (for they were bare), slipping Iris’s gloves back on and pressing the little tabs that kept them shut.

“Be quiet,” she said, “and listen, for I am going to tell you about the Black Death.”

And for the next half hour she did until Iris’s eyes came back into focus and Iris began to breathe normally and at last Iris fell asleep.

Don’t have nightmares, baby, said Alyx to herself, stroking one lock of silver hair that stuck out from under the girl’s hood. Don’t have nightmares, thirty-three-year-old baby. She did not know exactly what she herself felt. She bedded down in her own place, leaving all that for the next day, thinking first of her own children: the two put out to nurse, the third abandoned in the hills when she had run away from her husband at seventeen and (she thought) not to a Youth Core. She smiled in the dark. She wondered if Gunnar had known who was carrying on so. She wondered if he minded. She thought again of Iris, of Machine, of the comfort it was to hear human breathing around you at night, the real comfort.

I’ve got two of them, she thought, and damn Gunnar anyway.

She fell asleep.

The thirty-fifth day was the day they lost Raydos. They did not lose him to the cats, although they found big paw-prints around their camp the next morning and met one of the spotted animals at about noon, circling it carefully at a distance while it stood hissing and spitting on a rocky eminence, obviously unsure whether to come any closer or not. It was less than a meter high and had enormous padded paws: a little animal and a lot of irritation; Alyx dropped to the rear to watch it stalk them for the next three hours, keeping her crossbow ready and making abrupt movements from time to time to make it duck out of sight. Gunnar was up front, leading the way. Its persistence rather amused her at first but she supposed that it could do a lot of damage in spite of its size and was beginning to wonder whether she could risk a loud shout—or a shot into the rocks—to drive it off, when for no reason at all that she could see, the animal’s tufted ears perked forward, it crouched down abruptly, gave a kind of hoarse, alarmed growl and bounded awkwardly away. The whole column in front of her had halted. She made her way to the front where Gunnar stood like a huge statue, his big arm pointing up straight into the sky, as visible as the Colossus of Rhodes.

“Look,” he said, pleased, “a bird.” She yanked at his arm, pulling him to the ground, shouting “Down, everyone!” and all of them fell on to their hands and knees, ducking their heads. The theory was that the white suits and white packs would blend into the snow as long as they kept their faces hidden, or that they would look like animals and that any reading of body heat would be disregarded as such. She wondered if there was any sense to it. She thought that it might be a bird. It occurred to her that distances were hard to judge in a cloudless sky. It also occurred to her that the birds she knew did not come straight down, and certainly not that fast, and that the snow-shoed cat had been running away from something snow-shoed cats did not like. So it might be just as well to occupy their ridiculous position on the ground until whatever it was satisfied its curiosity and went away, even though her knees and elbows hurt and she was getting the cramp, even though things were absolutely silent, even though nothing at all seemed to be happening…

“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 travelling 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 clear. 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 adjustment oh 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.

“But you will do a lot of things,” she said. “Yes, you will get out of it. You will lose your body and Gunnar will lose his—his self-respect; he will make one more ghastly mistake and then another and another and in the end he will lose his soul at the very least and perhaps his life.”

“You know all this,” said Machine.

“Of course,” said Alyx, “of course I do. I know it all. I know that Gavrily will do something generous and brave and silly and because he never in his life has learned how to do it, we will lose Gavrily. And then Iris—no, Iris has had it already, I think, and of course the Heavenly Twins will lose nothing because they have nothing to lose. Maybe they will lose their religion or drop their pills down a hole. And I—well, I—my profession, perhaps, or whatever loose junk I have lying around, because this blasted place is too good, you see, too easy; we don’t meet animals, we don’t meet paid professional murderers, all we meet is our own stupidity. Over and over. It’s a picnic. It’s a damned picnic. And Iris will come through because she never lives above her means. And a picnic is just her style.”

“What will you lose?” said Machine, folding his arms across his chest.

“I will lose you,” she said unsteadily, “what do you think of that?” He caught her in his arms, crushing the breath out of her.

“I like it,” he whispered sardonically. “I like it, Tiny, because I am jealous. I am much too jealous. If I thought you didn’t like me, I’d kill myself and if I thought you liked Iris more than me, I’d kill her. Do you hear me?”

“Don’t be an ass,” she said. “Let me go.”

“I’ll never let you go. Never. I’ll die. With you.”

Gunnar backed ponderously out of the bubble. He closed the door, running his hands carefully over the place where the door joined the rest of the ship until the crack disappeared. He seemed satisfied with it then. He watched it, although nothing seemed to happen for a few minutes; then the bubble rose noiselessly off the snow, went up faster and faster into the evening sky as if sliding along a cable and disappeared into the afterglow. It was going north. Alyx tried to pull away but Machine held on to her, grinning at his rival as the latter turned around, absently dusting his hands together. Then Gunnar groped for his gloves, put them on, absently looking at the two, at the others who had shared the contents of Raydos’s pack and were flattening the pack itself into a shape that could be carried in an empty food container. There was the corpse, the man everyone had forgotten. Gunnar looked at it impersonally. He looked at Iris, the nuns, Gavrily, the other two: only seven of them now. His gloved hands dusted themselves together. He looked at nothing.

“Well?” drawled Machine.

“I think we will travel a little now,” said Gunnar;

“I think we will travel by starlight.” He repeated the phrase, as if it pleased him. “By starlight,” he said, “yes.”

“By snowlight?” said Machine, raising his eyebrows.