Picnic on Paradise

“That too,” said Gunnar, looking at something in the distance, “yes—that too—”

“I’m all right,” he said quietly. “I don’t care who you play with,” and he plodded over to the others, bent over, very big.

“I shall take you tonight,” said Machine between his teeth; “I shall take you right before the eyes of that man!”

She brought the point of her elbow up into his ribs hard enough to double him over; then she ran through the powdery snow to the front of the little line that had already formed. Gunnar was leading them. Her hands were icy. She took his arm—it was unresponsive, nothing but a heavy piece of meat—and said, controlling her breathing, for she did not want him to know that she had been running—“I believe it is getting warmer.”

“I mention this to you,” Alyx went on, “because you are the only one of us who knows anything about weather. Or about machinery. We would be in a bad way without you.”

“I am very grateful,” she said, “for what you did with the ship. There is nobody here who knows a damn thing about that ship, you know. No one but you could have—” (she was about to say saved Raydos’s life) “done anything with the control board. I am grateful. We are all grateful.”

“Can you tell me why?” said she. “I know nothing about it. I would appreciate it very much if you could tell me why.”

Gunnar stopped walking. He turned to her slowly and slowly looked down at her, blankly, a little puzzled, frowning a little.

“I don’t remember hearing anything,” he said. Then he added sensibly, “That ship is a very good ship; it’s insulated; you don’t hear anything inside.”

“Tell me about it,” said Alyx, her voice almost failing, “and tell me why it’s going to snow.”

They walked by starlight until a haze covered the stars; it got warmer, it got slippery. She tried to remember their destination by the stars. They stopped on Paradise’s baby mountains, under the vast, ill-defined shadow of something going up, up, a slope going up until it melted into the gray sky, for the cloud cover shone a little, just as the snow shone a little, the light just enough to see by and not enough to see anything at all. When they lay down there was a pervasive feeling of falling to the left. Iris kept trying to clutch at the snow. Alyx told them to put their feet downhill and so they did, lying in a line and trying to hold each other’s hands. Gunnar went off a little to one side, to watch—or rather to listen. Everything was indistinct. Five minutes after everyone had settled down—she could still hear their small readjustments, the moving about, the occasional whispering—she discerned someone squatting at her feet, his arms about his knees, balanced just so. She held out one arm and he pulled her to her feet, putting his arms around her: Machine’s face, very close in the white darkness. “Over there,” he said, jerking his head towards the place where Gunnar was, perhaps sitting, perhaps standing, a kind of blot against the gray sky.

“Why not?” said Machine in a low, mocking voice. “Do you think he doesn’t know?”

“Do you think there’s anyone here who doesn’t know?” Machine continued, a trifle brutally. “When you go off, you raise enough hell to wake the dead.”

She nudged him lightly in the ribs, in the sore place, just enough to loosen his arms; and then she presented him with the handle of one of her knives, nudging him with that also, making him take step after step backwards, while he whispered angrily:

“Here,” she whispered, holding out the knife, “take it, take it. Finish him off. Cut off his head.”

“But not with me,” she said; “oh, no!” and when he threw her down onto the snow and climbed on top of her, shaking her furiously, she only laughed, calling him a baby, teasing him, tickling him through his suit, murmuring mocking love-words, half in Greek, the better to infuriate him. He wound his arms around her and pulled, crushing her ribs, her fingers, smothering her with his weight, the knees of his long legs digging one into her shin and one into her thigh; there would be spectacular bruises tomorrow.

“Kill me,” she whispered ecstatically. “Go on, kill me, kill me! Do what you want!” He let her go, lifting himself up on his hands, moving his weight off her. He stared down at her, the mask of a very angry young man. When she had got her breath back a little, she said:

“Like hell,” said Machine shortly and began to get up. She flung both arms around him and held on.

“Do it again,” she said, “do it again. Only please, please, more carefully!” He pulled away, making a face, then stayed where he was.

“I hate that man!” he burst out. “I hate his damned ‘acceptable’ oddities and his—his conventional heroism and his—the bloody amateur!”

“He’s spent his life being praised for individualism,” he went on, “his individualism, good God! Big show. Make the Civs feel happy. Never two steps from trans and ports and flyers. Medicine. High-powered this. High-powered that. ‘Ooooh, isn’t he marvel! Isn’t he brave! Let’s get a tape and go shooting warts with Gunnar! Let’s get a tape and go swimming undersea in Gunnar!’ He records his own brain impulses, did you know that?”

“Yes,” said Machine, “he records them and sells them. Gunnar’s battle with the monsters. Gunnar’s narrow escape. Gunnar’s great adventure. All that heroism. That’s what they want. That’s why he’s rich!”

“Well, they certainly wouldn’t want the real thing,” said Alyx softly, “now would they?”

“And I doubt,” said Alyx, moving closer to him, “that Gunnar is recording anything just now; I think, my dear, that he’s very close to the edge now.”

“Are you rich?” said Alyx. Machine began to weep. He rolled to one side, half-laughing, half sobbing.

“I don’t have a damn thing,” he said. “I knew there would be a flash here—they knew but they thought they could get away—so I came. To get lost. Spent everything. But you can’t get lost, you know. You can’t get lost anywhere any more, not even in a—a—you would call it a war, Agent.”

“Yes, very funny. A war in a tourist resort. I hope we don’t make it. I hope I die here.”

She slid her finger down the front of his suit. “I hope not,” she said. “No,” she said (walking both hands up and down his chest, beneath the long underwear, her little moist palms) “I certainly hope not.”

She shook her head. She was thoughtfully making the tent of the night before. He helped her.

“Listen, love,” she said, “I have no money, either, but I have something else; I am a Project. I think I have cost a lot of money. If we get through this, one of the things this Project will need to keep it happy so it can go on doing whatever it’s supposed to do is you. So don’t worry about that.”

“And you think they’ll let you,” said Machine. It was a flat, sad statement.

“No,” she said, “but nobody ever let me do anything in my life before and I never let that stop me.” They were lying on their sides face to face now; she smiled up at him. “I am going to disappear into this damned suit if you don’t pull me up,” she said. He lifted her up a little under the arms and kissed her. His face looked as if something were hurting him.

“The Machine,” he said stiffly, “is—the Machine is fond of the Project.”

She put her arm around the back of his neck and rubbed her cheek against his. “We’ll sleep,” she said. They lay together for some time, a little uncomfortable because both were balanced on their sides, until he turned over on his back and she lay half on him and half off, her head butting into his armpit. She began to fall asleep, then accidentally moved so that his arm cut off her breathing, then snorted. She made a little, dissatisfied noise.

“Too hot,” she said sleepily, “blasted underwear,” so with difficulty she took it off—and he took off his—and they wormed it out of the top of the suits where the hoods tied together and chucked it into the snow. She was breathing into his neck. She had half fallen asleep again when all of a sudden she woke to a kind of earthquake: knees in a tangle, jouncing, bruising, some quiet, vehement swearing and a voice telling her for God’s sake to wake up. Machine was trying to turn over. Finally he did.

“Yes, yes, I am,” said Alyx. She opened her eyes. He seemed to be trembling all over and very upset; he was holding her too hard, also.

“This is not going to be a good one,” said Machine, “do you know what I mean?”

“Listen,” he said shakily, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me; I’m falling apart. I can’t explain it, but it’s going to be a bad one; you’ll just have to wait through it.”

“All right, all right,” she said, “give me a minute,” and she lay quietly, thinking, rubbing his hair—looked Oriental, like a brush now, growing into a peak on his forehead—began kissing various parts of his face, put her arms around his back, felt his hands on her hips (too hard; she thought I’ll be black and blue tomorrow), concentrated on those hands, and then began to rub herself against him, over and over and over, until she was falling apart herself, dizzy, head swimming, completely out of control.

“Forgiven,” Alyx managed to say as he plunged in, as she diffused over the landscape—sixty leagues in each direction—and then turned into a drum, a Greek one, hourglass-shaped with the thumped in-and-out of both skins so extreme that they finally met in the middle, so that she then turned inside-out, upside-down and switched right-and-left sides, every cell, both hands, each lobe of her brain, all at once, while someone (anonymous) picked her up by the navel and shook her violently in all directions, remarking “If you don’t make them cry, they won’t live.” She came to herself with the idea that Machine was digging up rocks. He was banging her on the head with his chin. Then after a while he stopped and she could feel him struggle back to self-possession; he took several deep, even breaths; he opened the suit hoods and pushed his face over her shoulder into the snow; then he opened one side of the little tent and let in a blast of cold air.

“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.”

“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.”

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 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!”

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

“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 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.”

“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 faces 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:

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

“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:

“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: Gunnar 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—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.

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:

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

She got in front of him, smiling, clasping her hands together, saying “You think I’m fooling, don’t you?” Gunnar stopped.

“Well, of course,” she said sweetly, “of course it was,” and crossing her hands wrist to wrist as she had done a thousand times before, she suddenly bent them in and then flipped them wide, each hand holding a knife. She bent her knees slightly; he was three heads taller and twice as heavy, easily. He put one hand stupidly up to his head.

“Oh, there’s a risk,” she said, “there’s that, of course,” and she began to turn him back towards the others as he automatically stepped away from her, turning him in a complete circle to within sight of the others, while his face grew frightened, more and more awake, until he finally cried out:

“I’m not like you!” he said, “I can’t help it, what do you expect of me?”

“None of us,” said Gunnar quickly, “can help the way we are brought up, Agent. You are a creature of your world, believe me, just as I am of mine; I can’t help it; I wanted to be like you but I’m not, can I help that? I did what I could! What can a man do? What do you expect me to do? What could I do!”

“I am ashamed,” said Gunnar, stammering, “I am ashamed, Agent, I admit I did the wrong thing. I should have gone down, yes, I should have—put those things away, for God’s sake!—forgive me, please, hate me but forgive me; I am what I am, I am only what I am! For Heaven’s sake! For God’s sake!”

“Defend yourself,” said Alyx, and when he did not—for it did not seem to occur to him that this was possible—she slashed the fabric of his suit with her left-hand knife and with the right she drove Trans-Temp’s synthetic steel up to the hilt between Gunnar’s ribs. It did not kill him; he staggered back a few steps, holding his chest. She tripped him onto his back and then cut his suit open while the madman did not even move, all this in an instant, and when he tried to rise she slashed him through the belly and then—lest the others intrude—pulled back his head by the pale hair and cut his throat from ear to ear. She did not spring back from the blood but stood in it, her face strained in the same involuntary grimace as before, the cords standing out on her neck. Iris grabbed her arm and pulled her away.

“He came and got us,” whispered Iris, terrified, “he did, he did, really.”

“He took his time,” said Gavrily slowly. The five of them stood watching Gunnar, who lay in a red lake. The giant was dead. Alyx watched him until Iris turned around; she followed obediently for a few steps, then stopped and knelt and wiped her hands in the snow. Then putting on her gloves, she took handfuls of snow and rubbed them over her suit, up and down, up and down. She cleaned herself carefully and automatically, like a cat. Then she put the knives away and silently followed the four others up the pass, floundering and slipping through the still-falling snow, hunched a little, her fists clenched. At dusk they found a shallow cave at the bottom of a long slope, not a rock cave but soft rock and frozen soil. Gavrily said they were over the pass. They sat as far back against the cave wall as they could, watching the snow fall across the opening and glancing now and again at Alyx. She was feeling a kind of pressure at the back of her neck, something insistent like a forgotten thought, but she could not remember what it was; then she took the medicine bulb out of her sleeve and began playing with it, tossing it up and down in her hand. That was what she had been trying to remember. Finally Iris giggled nervously and said:

“Oh Lord,” said Iris uncomfortably, “we’ve still got enough to eat, haven’t we?”

“Sure,” said Iris, “that’s lecithin. From synthetic milk,” and then she clapped both hands across her mouth as Alyx leapt to her feet and threw the thing out into the falling snow. It seemed to Alyx that she had suddenly walked into an enormous snake, or a thing like one of the things that cleaned up houses in civilized countries: something long, strong, and elastic that winds around you and is everywhere the same, everywhere equally strong so that there is no relief from it, no shifting it or getting away from it. She could not bear it. She did not think of Machine but only walked up and down for a few minutes, trying to change her position so that there would be a few minutes when it would not hurt; then she thought of a funnel and something at the bottom of it; and then finally she saw him. Wedged in like broken goods. She thought Wedged in like broken goods. She put her hands over her eyes. The same face. The same face Iris had gotten-up in alarm and put one hand on Alyx’s shoulder; Alyx managed to whisper “Iris!”

“Get those damned women,” said Alyx hoarsely for now he was all over the cave, pale, eyes shut, on every wall, irretrievably lost, a smashed machine with a broken arm at the bottom of a rock chimney somewhere. It was intolerable. For a moment she thought that she was bleeding, that her arms and legs were cut away. Then that disappeared. She put out her hands to touch his face, to stay awake, to wake him up, again and again and again, and then this would not stop but went on and on in a kind of round dance that she could not control, over and over in complete silence with the cold of the rock chimney and the dim light and the smell of the place, with Machine still dead, no matter what she did, lying on top of his pack and not speaking, wedged into the rock like a broken toy with one leg dangling. It kept happening. She thought I never lost anything before. She cried out in her own language.

When the sister came with the pill-box to comfort her, Alyx wrenched the box out of the woman’s hand, swallowed three of the things, shoved the box up her own sleeve—above the knife-harness—and waited for death.

But the only thing that happened was that the nuns got frightened and retreated to the other end of the cave.

She woke up all at once, standing, like a board hit with a hoe; Paradise—which had been stable—turned over once and settled itself. This was interesting but not novel. She looked outside the cave, forgot what she had seen, walked over to the nuns and pulled one of them up by the hair, which was very amusing; she did it to the other, too, and then when the noise they made had waked up Iris and Gavrily, she said “Damn it, Gavrily, you better be careful, this place has it in for me.”

He only blinked at her. She pulled him outside by one arm and whispered it fiercely into his ear, pulling him down and standing on her toes to do so, but he remained silent. She pushed him away. She looked at his frightened face and said contemptuously “Oh, you! you can’t hear,” and dropped her pack into the snow; then when somebody put it on her back she dropped it again; only the third time she lost interest. They put it on again and she forgot about it. By then they were all up and facing out onto the plains, a flat land covered with hard snow, a little dirty, like pulverized ice, and a brown haze over the sky so that the sun showed through it in an unpleasant smear; she wanted to look at it and would not go anywhere until someone pushed her. It was not an attractive landscape and it was not an unattractive one; it was fascinating. Behind her Gavrily began to sing:

“When I woke up, my darling dear,

When I woke up and found you near,

I thought you were an awful cutie

And you will always be my sweetie.”

She turned around and shouted at him. Someone gave a shocked gasp. They prodded her again. She found Iris at her elbow, quite unexpectedly pushing her along, and began to explain that her feet were doing that part of the work. She was very civil. Then she added:

“You see, I am not like you; I am not doing anything idiotic or lying in the snow making faces. I haven’t lost my head and I’m going on in a perfectly rational manner; I can still talk and I can still think and I wish to the devil you would stop working my elbow like a pump; it is very annoying, besides being entirely unnecessary. You are not a nice girl.”

“I don’t know that language,” said Iris helplessly “what are you saying?”

She lay down flat in the snow and watched it as the others ate, through a pair of binoculars she had gotten from someone’s pack, concentrating on the detail work and spinning the little wheel in the middle until Iris grabbed her hands and hoisted her to her feet. This made her cross and she bit Iris in the arm, getting a mouthful of insulated suit. She seriously considered that Iris had played a trick on her. She looked for the binoculars but they were not around; she lagged after Iris with her gloves dangling from her wrists and her bare fingers making circles around her eyes; she tried to tell Iris to look at that over there, which is what that which it is, and then a terrible suspicion flashed into her mind in one sentence:

Immediately she ran to Iris, tugging at Iris’s arm, holding her hand, crying out “Iris, Iris, I’m not going out of my mind, am I? Am I going out of my mind? Am I?” and Iris said “No, you’re not; come on, please,” (crying a little) and the voice of one of the Hellish Duo sounded, like an infernal wind instrument creeping along the bottom of the snow, in a mean, meaching, nasty tone, just like the nasty blur in the brown sky, an altogether unpleasant, exceptionable, and disgusting tone:

“How can I come on if I’m coming out?” demanded Alyx, going stiff all over with rage.

“How,” repeated Alyx in a fury, “can I come on if I’m coming out? How? I’d like you to explain that”—her voice rising shrilly—“that—conundrum, that impossibility, that flat perversion of the laws of nature; it is absolutely and utterly impossible and you are nothing but an excuse, an evasion, a cheap substitute for a human being and a little tin whore!”

“But how can I!” exploded Alyx. “How can I be on and out? How can I? It’s ridiculous!”

Iris began to cry. Alyx folded her arms around herself and sunk her head on her chest; then she went over to Iris and patted Iris with her mittens; she would have given up even the sky if it made Iris unhappy. She said reassuringly “There, there.”

“Just come on, please,” said Iris. Subdued, Alyx followed her. A great while after, when she had put down the other foot, Alyx said “You understand, don’t you?” She took Iris’s arm, companionably.

Towards evening, long after the immense day had sunk and even the diffused light died out so that the bottom of the plain was nothing but a black pit, though even then the snow-luminescence glowed about them vaguely, not enough to see by but enough (Alyx thought) to make you take a chance and break your neck—she realized that they had been handing her about from one to the other all day. She supposed it was the pills. They came and went in waves of unreason, oddly detached from herself; she dozed between them as she walked, not thinking of suggesting to the others that they stop, and when they did stop she merely sat down on the snow, put her arms around her knees and stared off into the darkness. Eventually the light from the snow failed. She felt for the box in her sleeve and laughed a little; someone near her stirred and whispered “What? What?” and then yawned. The breathing fell again into its soft, regular rhythm. Alyx laughed again, dreamily, then felt something in back of her, then turned around to look for it, then found nothing. It was in back of her again. She yawned. The darkness was becoming uncomfortable. She fought the desire to sleep. She felt about and nudged the person nearest her, who immediately sat up—to judge from the sound—and gave out a kind of “Ha!” like a bellows. Alyx laughed.

“None,” said Gavrily. “Bad for the liver. Meta—metabol—give ’em back.”

“You won’t get them,” said Alyx. “Don’t try. How many can I take without making a nuisance of myself?”

“No, no,” said Gavrily stupidly, “none,” and he muttered something else, turned over in the dark and apparently fell asleep. She heard him snore; then it was turned off into a strangled, explosive snort and he breathed like a human being. Alyx sat peering keenly into the dark, feeling them come closer and closer and smiling to herself. When the world was about to touch her—and she would not stand for that—she took out her little box. She broke a pill and swallowed half. She came to the surface nonetheless, as one does when breaking the surface of water, blinded, chilled, shocked by the emptiness of air; the snow solidified under her, her suit began to take shape and grate like iron, the sleepers next to her emerged piecemeal out of the fog, grotesquely in separate limbs, in disconnected sounds, there were flashes of realization, whole moments of absolute reality. It simply would not do. She grinned nervously and hugged her knees. She blinked into the darkness as if her eyes were dazzled; she held on to her knees as a swimmer holds on to the piles of a jetty with his fingertips, she who had never been drunk in her life because it impaired the reason. She stuffed the box back up her sleeve. Eventually something happened—she shook her head as if to get rid of a fly or a nervous tic—the water rose. It closed over her head. She yawned. With her mouth wide open, water inside, water outside, she slid down, and down, and down, singing like a mermaid: I care for nobody, no, not I. She slept.

That they were vast was undeniably true, a mental land as flat and bare as a world-sized table, and yet with here and there those disturbing dips and slides: concave surfaces that somehow remained flat, hills that slid the other way, like the squares on a chessboard which bend and produce nausea. Such places exist.

Her sins were terrible. She was staring at a pink marble bathtub, full of water, a bathtub in which she had once bathed in the palace of Knossos on Crete, and which now hung on the ceiling overhead. The water was slipping. She was going to be drowned. The ocean stuck to the sky, heaving. In her youth she had walked town streets and city streets, stolen things, been immensely popular; it had all come to nothing. Nothing had come out of nothing. She did not regret a single life lost. In the snow appeared a chessboard and on the chessboard figures, and these figures one by one slid down into squares in the board and disappeared. The squares puckered and became flat. She put her fingers into them but they would not take her, which was natural enough in a woman who had loved not even her own children. You could not trust anyone in those times. The electromagnetic spectrum was increasing. Slowly the plains filled with air, as a pool with water; an enormous racket went on below the cliff that was the edge of the earth; and finally the sun threw up one hand to grasp the cliff, climbed, clung, rose, mounted and sailed brilliantly white and clear into a brilliant sky.

It said to her, in the voice of Iris: “You are frozen through and through. You are a detestable woman.”

When the dawn came, bringing a false truce, Alyx was sitting up with her arms clasped about her knees and watching the others wake up. She was again, as before, delicately iced over, on the line between reason and unreason. She thought she would keep it that way. She ate with the others, saying nothing, doing nothing, watching the murky haze in the sky and the spreading thumbprint in it that was the sun. The landscape was geometric and very pleasing. In the middle of the morning they passed a boulder someone or something had put out on the waste: to one side of it was a patch of crushed snow and brown moss showing through. Later in the day the world became more natural, though no less pleasant, and they stopped to eat once more, sitting in the middle of the plain that spread out to nowhere in particular. Iris was leaning over and eating out of one hand, utterly beautiful as were all the others, the six or seven or eight of them, all very beautiful and the scenery too, all of which Alyx explained, and that at very great length.

“What do you mean!” cried Iris suddenly. “What do you mean you’re going to go along without us, what do you mean by that!”

“And don’t call me names,” said Iris, trembling visibly. “I’ve had enough,” and she went off and sat by somebody else. What have you had enough of? thought Alyx curiously, but she followed her anyway, to see that she came to no harm. Iris was sitting by one of the nuns. Her face was half turned away and there was a perceptible shadow on it. The nun was saying “Well, I told you.” The shadow on Iris’s face seemed to grow into a skin disease, something puckered or blistered like the lichens on a rock, a very interesting purple shadow; then it contracted into a small patch on her face and looked as if it were about to go out, but finally it turned into something.

“Well, where’d you get it?” said Alyx. “Who gave it to you? Did you fall against a rock?

“I think you’re making it up,” she added frankly, but the words did not come out quite right. The black eye wavered as if it were going to turn into a skin disease again. “Well?” demanded Alyx. “How’d you get it out here in the middle of the desert? Huh? How did you? Come on!”

“Oh, she won’t understand anything!” exclaimed one of the nuns contemptuously. Alyx sat down in the snow and tucked her feet under her. She put her arms around herself. Iris was turning away again, nursing the puffy flesh around her bloodshot eye: it was a purple bruise beginning to turn yellow and a remarkable sight, the focus of the entire plain, which had begun to wheel slowly and majestically around it. However, it looked more like a black eye every moment.

“In your sleep,” answered one of the nuns. “You are certainly a practiced woman. I believe you are a bad woman. We have all tried to take the pills away from you and the issue of it is that Iris has a black eye and Gavrily a sprained wrist. Myself, I wash my hands of it.”

“Of course,” she added with some satisfaction, “it is too late now. Much too late. You have been eating them all along. You can’t stop now; you would die, you know. Metabolic balances.”

She took command two days later when she had become more habituated to the stuff, and although someone followed them constantly (but out of sight) there were no more hallucinations and her decisions were—on the whole—sensible. She thought the whole thing was a grand joke. When the food disappeared from out of the bottomless bags, she turned them inside out and licked the dust off them, and the others did the same; when she bent down, supporting herself on one arm, and looked over the brown sky for aircraft, the others did the same; and when she held up two fingers against one eye to take the visual diameter of the bleary sun and then moved the two fingers three times to one side—using her other hand as a marker—to find out their way, so did they, though they did not know why. There was no moss, no food, hardly any light, and bad pains in the stomach. Snow held them up for a day when the sun went out altogether. They sat together and did not talk. The next day the sky lifted a little and they went on, still not talking. When the middle of the day came and they had rested a while, they refused to get up; so she had to pummel them and kick them to their feet. She said she saw a thing up ahead that was probably the Pole station; she said they had bad eyes and bad ears and bad minds and could not expect to see it. They went on for the rest of the day and the next morning had to be kicked and cuffed again until they got up, and so they walked slowly on, leaving always the same footprints in the thin snow, a line of footprints behind exactly matching the fresh line in front, added one by one, like a line of stitching. Iris said there was a hobby machine that did that with only a single foot, faster than the eye could follow, over and over again, depositing now a rose, now a face, again a lily, a dragon, a tower, a shield….

It sprawled over five acres of strangely irregular ground: cut-stone blocks in heaps, stone paths that led nowhere, stone walls that enclosed nothing, a ruined city, entirely roofless. Through their binoculars nothing looked taller than any of them. Nothing was moving. They stood staring at it but could make no sense of it. One of the nuns flopped down in the snow. Gavrily said:

“They know,” said Alyx. She was looking through the binoculars. She had her feet planted wide apart in the snow and was fiddling with the focus knob, trying to find something in the ruins. Around her the women lay like big dolls. She knew it was the Pole because of the position of the sun; she knew it was not a city and had never been a city but something the lieutenant had long ago called a giant aerial code and she knew that if someone does not come out to greet you, you do not run to greet him. She said “Stay here,” and hung the binoculars around her neck.

“Stay here,” she repeated, tucking the binoculars inside her suit, and dropping to her knees, she began to crawl forward. Gavrily, smiling, walked past her towards the giant anagram laid out on the snow; smiling, he turned and waved, saying something she could not catch; and resolutely marching forward—because he could talk to people best, she supposed, although he was stumbling a little and his face was gray—he kept on walking in the direction of the Pole station, over the flat plain, until his head was blown off.

It was done silently and bloodlessly, in a flash of light. Gavrily threw up both arms, stood still, and toppled over. Behind her Alyx heard someone gasp repeatedly, in a fit of hiccoughs. Silence.

Alyx had to kick them to get the packs off them; then she had to push Iris’s face into the snow until the girl stopped grabbing at her; she dragged all four packs over the snow like sleds, and stopping a few feet from Gavrily’s body, she dumped all four onto the ground and pulled Gavrily back by the feet. Marker, she thought. Cursing automatically, she wrenched the packs open and lobbed a few bottles at the town at random. They vanished in a glitter two meters from the ground. She thought for a moment and then rapidly assembled a crossbow; bolts fired from it met the same fate; the crossbow itself, carefully lifted into the air, flared at the tip and the whole thing became so hot that she had to drop it. Her gloves were charred. Wrapping bandages from one of the packs around the bow, she lifted it again, this time ten paces to one side; again the tip vanished; ten paces to the other side and the same thing happened; crawling forward with her sunglasses on, she held it up in front of her and watched the zone of disappearance move slowly down to the grip. She tried it with another, twenty paces to the left. Twenty paces to the right. Her palms were blistered, the gloves burned off. The thing got closer and closer to the ground; there would be no crawling under it. She retreated to Gavrily’s body and found Iris behind it, holding on to one of the packs to keep herself steady, whispering “What is it, what is it, what is it?”

“It’s a fence,” said Alyx, thrusting her stinging hands into the snow, “and whoever’s running it doesn’t have the sense to turn it off.”

“Oh no, it’s a machine,” whispered Iris, laying her head against the pack, “it’s a machine, it’s no use, there’s nobody there.”

“If there were nobody there,” said Alyx, “I do not think they would need a fence—Iris!” and she began shaking the girl, who seemed to be falling asleep.

“Doesn’t know anything,” said Iris, barely audible. “Idiots. Doesn’t care.”

“Only numbers,” said Iris, and passed out. Alyx pulled her over by one shoulder and rubbed snow on her face. She fed her snow and put her forefingers under the girl’s ears, pressing hard into the glands under them. The pain brought the girl around; “Only numbers,” she said again.

“Iris,” said Alyx slowly and distinctly, “I cannot read. You must count something out for me. You must count it out while I show those bastards that there is somebody out here. Otherwise we will never get in. We are not supposed to be recognized and we won’t be. We are camouflaged. You must give me some numbers.”

“Don’t know any,” said Iris. Alyx propped her up against what was left of one of the packs. She dozed off. Alyx brought her out of it again and the girl began to cry, tears going effortlessly down her cheeks, busily one after the other. Then she said “In the Youth Core we had a number.”

“It was the number of our Core and it meant the Jolly Pippin,” said Iris weakly. “It went like this—” and she recited it.

“I don’t know what those words mean,” said Alyx; “you must show me,” and holding up Iris’s hand, she watched while the girl slowly stuck up fingers: five seven seven, five six, seven five five six. Leaving Iris with her head propped against the pack, Alyx wound everything she could around the base of one of the crossbows, and lifting it upwards slowly spelled out five seven seven, five six, seven five five six, until everything was gone, when she wound another pack around another bow, leaving the first in the snow to cool, and again spelled out the number over and over until she could not move either hand, both hurt so abominably, and Iris had passed out for the second time.

Then something glittered in the middle of the Pole station and figures in snowsuits came running through the heaps of stone and the incomplete stone walls. Alyx thought dryly It’s about time. She turned her head and saw the nuns tottering toward her, she thought suddenly God, how thin! and feeling perfectly well, she got up to wave the nuns on, to urge them to greet the real human beings, the actual living people who had finally come out in response to Iris’s Jolly Pippin. A phrase she had heard sometime during the trip came to her mind: The Old School Yell. She stepped forward smartly and gestured to one of the men, but as he came closer—two others were picking up Iris, she saw, and still others racing toward the nuns—she realized that he had no face, or none to speak of, really, a rather amusing travesty or approximation, that he was, in fact, a machine like the workers she had seen in the sheds when they had first set out on their picnic. Someone had told her then, “They’re androids. Don’t nod.” She continued to wave. She turned around for a last look at Paradise and there, only a few meters away, as large as life, stood Machine with his arms crossed over his chest. She said to him “What’s a machine?” but he did not answer. With an air of finality, with the simplicity and severity of a dying god, he pulled over his blue eyes the goggled lenses and snout of another species, rejecting her, rejecting all of them; and tuned in to station Nothing (twenty-four hours a day every day, someone had said) he turned and began to walk away, fading as he walked, walking as he went away, listening to Trivia between the earth and the air until he walked himself right into a cloud, into nothing, into the blue, blue sky.

Ah, but I feel fine! thought Alyx, and walking forward, smiling as Gavrily had done, she saw under the hood of her android the face of a real man. She collapsed immediately.

Three weeks later Alyx was saying goodbye to Iris on the Moondrom on Old Earth, a vast idiot dome full of mist and show-lights, with people of all sorts rising and falling on streams of smoke. Iris was going the cheap way to the Moon for a conventional weekend with a strange young man. She was fashionably dressed all in silver, for that was the color that month: silver eyes, silvered eyelids, a cut-out glassene dress with a matching cloak, and her silver luggage and coiffure, both vaguely spherical, bobbing half a meter in the air behind their owner. It would have been less unnerving if the hair had been attached to Iris’s head; as it was, Alyx could not keep her eyes off it.

Moreover, Iris was having hysterics for the seventh time in the middle of the Moondrom because her old friend who had gone through so much with her, and had taught her to shoot, and had saved her life, would not tell her anything—anything—anything!

“Oh, you think I’ll tell him!” snapped Iris scornfully, referring to her escort whom neither of them had yet met. She was searching behind her in the air for something that was apparently supposed to come out of her luggage, but didn’t. Then they sat down, on nothing.

“Listen, baby,” said Alyx, “just listen. For the thirty-third time, Trans-Temp is not the Great Trans-Temporal Cadre of Heroes and Heroines and don’t shake your head at me because it isn’t. It’s a study complex for archaeologists, that’s all it is, and they fish around blindfold in the past, love, just as you would with a bent pin; though they’re very careful where and when they fish because they have an unholy horror of even chipping the bottom off a canoe. They think the world will blow up or something. They stay thirty feet above the top of the sea and twenty feet below it and outside city limits and so on and so on, just about everything you can think of. And they can’t even let through anything that’s alive. Only one day they were fishing in the Bay of Tyre a good forty feet down and they just happened to receive twenty-odd cubic meters of sea-water complete with a small, rather inept Greek thief who had just pinched an expensive chess set from the Prince of Tyre, who between ourselves is no gentleman. They tell me I was attached to a rope attached to knots attached to a rather large boulder with all of us considerably more dead than alive, just dead enough, in fact, to come through at all, and just alive enough to be salvageable. That is, I was. They also tell me that this is one chance in several billion billion so there is only one of me, my dear, only one, and there never will be any more, prehistoric or heroic or unheroic or otherwise, and if you would only please, please oblige your escort by telling—”

“They’ll send you back!” said Iris, clasping her hands with wonderful intensity.

Here Iris jumped up, her mouth open, her face clouding over. She was fingering something behind her ear.

“I have to go,” she said absently. She smiled a little sadly. “That’s a very good story,” she said.

“I’ll send you something,” said Iris hastily. “I’ll send you a piece of the Moon; see if I don’t.”

“The historical sites,” said Alyx. She was about to say something more, something light, but at that moment Iris—snatching frantically in the air behind her for whatever it was that had not come out the first time and showed no signs of doing so the second—burst into passionate tears.

“How will you manage?” she cried, “oh, how will you, you’re seven years younger than I am, you’re just a baby!” and weeping in a swirl of silver cloak, and hair, and luggage, in a storm of violently crackling sparks that turned gold and silver and ran off the both of them like water, little Iris swooped down, threw her arms around her littler friend, wept some more, and immediately afterward rose rapidly into the air, waving goodbye like mad. Halfway up to the foggy roof she produced what she had apparently been trying to get from her luggage all along: a small silver flag, a jaunty square with which she blew her nose and then proceeded to wave goodbye again, smiling brilliantly. It was a handkerchief.

Send me a piece of the Moon, said Alyx silently, send me something l can keep, and turning away she started out between the walls of the Moondrom, which are walls that one cannot see, through the cave that looks like an enormous sea of fog; and if you forget that it was made for civilized beings, it begins to look, once you have lost your way, like an endless cave, an endless fog, through which you will wander forever.

At the exit—and it was the right exit, the one with billowing smoke that shone ten thousand colors from the lights in the floor and gave you, as you crossed it, the faint, unpleasant sensation of being turned slowly upside down, there where ladies’ cloaks billowed and transparent clothing seemed to dissolve in streams of fire—

Stood Machine. Her heart stopped for a moment, automatically. The fifth or sixth time that day, she estimated.

“They also tell me,” she went on, “that I am going to teach my special and peculiar skills in a special and peculiar little school, for they seem to think our pilgrimage a success, despite its being full of their own inexcusable blunders, and they also seem to think that my special and peculiar skills are detachable from my special and peculiar attitudes. Like Iris’s hair. I think they will find that they are wrong.”

“Raydos is blind,” she said, “stone blind, did you know that? Some kind of immune reaction; when you ask them, they pull a long face and say that medicine can’t be expected to do everything. A foolproof world and full of fools. And then they tape wires on my head and ask me how it feels to be away from home; and they shake their heads when I tell them that I am not away from home; and then they laugh a little—just a little—when I tell them that I have never had a home.”

“Oh yes we will! By God we will! Eh, love?” and she stepped through the smoke, which now contained nothing except the faint, unpleasant sensation of being turned slowly upside down.

Iris may turn out to be surprisingly accurate, she thought, about the Great Trans-Temporal Cadre of Heroes and Heroines.

Even if the only thing trans-temporal about them is their attitudes. The attitudes that are not detachable from my special and peculiar skills.