The thought of being raped by Raztupisp-minz was ludicrous and horrible… mostly ludicrous, she decided. No man had ever started by telling her to think of him as a neuter.
Tashayamp took her back to the cell, with Mr. and Mrs. Woodward and Wes Dawson. They were there long enough to eat and use the toilet. The only thing that could have made that tolerable to Alice was watching how it bothered the others.
An hour’s rest, then fithp came to escort them to the ducts. None of the humans had noticed that she wasn’t talking. Maybe they were glad.
Alice broke away from the others as soon as she could, and let the wind carry her away, farther than she’d ever gone before. She wasn’t feeling sociable. Presently she braked herself and began desultorily to clean the walls.
The wind had grown cold. It matched her mood; she hardly noticed at first. But the wall was even colder, on one side. Here was a curve to mark a side channel in the duct, but it was blocked by a hatch. She passed it. Soon the wall warmed.
Alice went back.
She didn’t like taking orders, and she didn’t like knowing that things were hidden from her. The goddam psychiatrists always had something they weren’t telling her.
There was a slot to house the hatch. Alice got her fingers into a crack and pushed, and the door moved back against springs, enough to let her through.
The air was terribly cold and still. She followed a short duct and found a grill.
Ten yards beyond was a peculiar surface, black and nearly smooth, but with undulations in it, like very dirty ice. With her face pressed to the grill Alice could see the curve of it, like the inner wall of a cylinder.
She studied it for a time. There was a bulge in the surface … like an unfinished raised relief painting… a frieze of one of the horrors. Dirty ice? Dawson had said… what? The horrors liked mud. It puzzled them that humans bathed in clean water. But frozen mud?
The grill was loose in her hands.
She pushed it aside and floated in.
It was frozen mud on one side, a ceiling of painted friezes on the other. The artwork was weird, alien, sometimes beautiful. Horrors — fithp — half hidden among weird trees; she recognized some from the Garden area. Here a good representation of one of the horrors faced a block covered with alien script. And sculpted into the opposing mudbank was a similar shape…
She’d freeze here. Alice backed into the duct, pulled the grill after her, and set it in place.
Alice didn’t like secrecy. She would have to learn more. She found an exit from the air shaft.
This part of the ship was strange, and she didn’t know how to get home. It was hard, stopping one of the horrors in the corridor She said, “Raztupisp-minz,” and followed it after it gave up trying to talk to her.
She was tired and she ached. The horrors on Earth had stopped her before she got around to collecting conveniences like cosmetics and liniment. Cleaning out air ducts was so much like flying! She hadn’t noticed how hard she was working. She wanted Ben Gay. She wanted to curl up and wait for the pain to go away.
“Alice wants to tell you something,” Melissa said.
Jeri stirred wearily. “How do you know?”
“She keeps looking at you. But she wants to see you alone. I know, Mom. I can tell. Alice is—”
“Yeah.” Interesting. Can you read her mind? Or are you guessing? Or what? Jeri floated lazily over to grip the wall beside Alice.
“How’d it go?”
Words bubbled out quickly. “Jeri, I found a peculiar place. Cold enough to freeze your ass off. Locked off. Black ice everywhere, or something like it. A long way from here.”
“Storage room? Anything stored there?”
“No, just ice, all along the one wall, the hull wall. Dawson said they like mud. Maybe it’s their idea of a big spa. Why would they freeze their spa?”
“Let’s ask Arvid.”
Alice looked afraid again.
“He won’t … he’s a good man, Alice.”
“Oh, all right …”
Rogachev frowned deeply. “Frozen solid?”
“I didn’t touch it. It must have been. It was cold.”
“No gravity. No spin, because we are mated to the foot. They cannot bathe in mud under those conditions, but from the pictures they showed us we know they enjoy that. They will have a place for mud, and they must keep it when there is no gravity. Da. So they froze it in place.”
“That makes sense,” Jeri said.
“Yeah,” Alice agreed. “All right, explain this one. There was a shape in the mud, like a frieze — like one of those horrors under a blanket.
“How? As if it were lying on its side?”
“Yeah. Now, what was that?”
Wes Dawson was close enough to hear. “You’re sure of this?”
“Yes.”
“A frieze of a fi’?”
“I didn’t say it was a frieze! I said it was like that,” Alice said.
“Certainly.” Dawson made his voice soothing. He made no move to come closer to her. “Arvid, what do you think?”
“I do not know.”
“I think we should tell Raztupisp-minz.”
“We will consider that,” Arvid said. He turned to Dmitri. “You have heard?”
“Da.”
They spoke rapidly, in Russian.
Jeri took Arvid’s arm. “They learn languages quickly,” she said. “They say they don’t know any Russian.”
