Alyx - Joanna Russ by Unknown Author Page B

one other thing,” he said. “We can’t have induction currents, you know. Might happen. You’ll have to give up everything metal. The knife, please.”
    She handed it over, thinking If I don't get that back— “Trans-Temp sent a synthetic substitute, of course,” the lieutenant went on briskly. “And crossbows—same stuff—and packs, and we’ll give you all the irradiated food we can get you. And insulated suits.”
    “And ignorance,” said she. His eyebrows went up.
    “Sheer ignorance,” she repeated. “The most valuable commodity of all. Me. No familiarity with mechanical transportation or the whatchamacallits. Stupid. Can’t read. Used to walking. Never used a compass in my life. Right?”
    “Your skill—” he began.
    From each of her low sandals she drew out what had looked like part of the ornamentation and flipped both knives expertly at the map on the wall—both hands, simultaneously—striking precisely at point A and point B.
    “You can have those, too,” she said.
    The lieutenant bowed. He pressed the wall again. The knives hung in a cloudy swirl, then in nothing, clear as air, while outside appeared the frosty blue sky, the snowy foothills drawing up to the long, easy swelling crests of Paradise’s oldest mountain chain—old and easy, not like some of the others, and most unluckily, only two thousand meters high.
    “By God!” said Alyx, fascinated, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen snow before.”
    There was a sound behind her, and she turned. The lieutenant had fainted.
    They weren’t right. She had palmed them a hundred times, flipped them, tested their balance, and they weren’t right. Her aim was off. They felt soapy. She complained to the lieutenant, who said you couldn’t expect exactly the same densities in synthetics, and sat shivering in her insulated suit in the shed, nodding now and again at the workers assembling their packs, while the lieutenant appeared and disappeared into the walls, a little frantically. “Those are just androids,” said Iris good-humoredly. “Don’t nod to them. Don’t you think it’s fun?"
    “Go cut your hair,” said Alyx.
    Iris’s eyes widened.
    “And tell that other woman to do the same,” Alyx added.
    “Zap!” said Iris cryptically, and ambled off. It was detestably chilly. The crossbows impressed her, but she had had no time to practice with them (Which will be remedied by every one of you bastards, she thought) and no time to get used to the cold, which all the rest of them seemed to like. She felt stupid. She began to wonder about something and tried to catch the lieutenant by the arm, cursing herself in her own language, trying to think in her own language and failing, giving up on the knives and finally herding everyone outside into the snow to practice with the crossbows. The wienie was surprisingly good. He stayed at it two hours after the others drifted off, repeating and repeating; Iris came back with her cut hair hanging around her face and confided that she had been named after part of a camera; the lieutenant’s hands began to shake a little on each appearance; and Machine became a dead shot. She stared at him. All the time he had kept the thing he wore on his head clamped over ears and eyes and nose. “He can see through it if he wants to,” said Iris. Maudey was talking earnestly in a corner with Gavrily, the middle-aged politician, and the whole thing was taking on the air of a picnic. Alyx grew exasperated. She pinched a nerve in the lieutenant’s arm the next time he darted across the shed and stopped him, he going “aaah!” and rubbing his arm; he said, “I’m very sorry, but—” She did it again.
    “Look here,” she said, “I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid—”
    “Sorry,” he said, and was gone again, into one of the walls, right into one of the walls.
    “He’s busy,” said Raydos, the flat-color man. “They’re sending someone else through and he’s trying to talk them out of