Alice: The Girl From Earth Read online

  Alice: The Girl From Earth

  Kir Bulychev

  Another well known series of Bulychev's stories are young adult stories about Alisa Seleznyova, a young girl from the future. A number of them were made into films, with Guest from the Future ("Гостья из будущего"), based on Bulychev's novel One Hundred Years Ahead ("Сто лет тому вперед"), the most widely known about a girl Alice living in the future. Another famous film was the animated feature The Mystery of the Third Planet (1981), for which Bulychev penned the screenplay. Alice's Birthday is a 2009 animated film based on one of his tales.

  Kir Bulychev

  Alice: The Girl From Earth

  Translated by John H. Costello

  Copyright 2002 by Kir Bulychev

  The Little Girl Nothing Ever Happens To

  Stories about the life of a little girl of the 22nd Century, as recounted by her father

  In Place of a Foreword

  Tomorrow Alice starts school. It will be a very interesting day. Her friends and acquaintances have been on the videophone to her all day and everyone is congratulating her. In fact Alice hasn’t let anyone have any peace for the last three months just talking about her new school.

  The Martian Boose sent her some sort of remarkable pencil case which no one ha s been able to open not me, not my co-workers, who include two Doctors of Science, and the Moscow Space Zoo’s chief mechanic.

  Shusher said he would accompany Alice to school to make certain she got a sufficiently experienced teacher.

  There has been an astonishing amount of fuss. From my recollection, when I went to school for the first time, no one bothered to raise such a bother.

  Now the commotion has died down somewhat; Alice has gone off to the Zoo to say good- bye to Bronty.

  And finally, it’s quiet in the house, and I can sit down and dictate a number of events from the lives of Alice and her friends. I’ll send these notes to Alice’s teacher. It will let her know what sort of dilettante she has to deal with in me, and it will let her know what she’s getting into with my daughter.

  From the very first, Alice was a child like any other. Until about three. The proof of my statement will be the events I relate first of all. But about a year ago, from when she first met Bronty, I have observed in her character the wisdom to do things not quite as everyone expects them to be done, to vanish at the most inconvenient times and even to by accident! make discoveries beyond the powers of even the greatest of modern scientists. Alice has the ability to get everyone to do what she wants, despite which she has a mass of good and true friends. For us, her parents, this has been very difficult. We are simply not able to just sit around at home all the time. I work in the zoo, and my wife is an architect constructing buildings, most of the time on other planets.

  I want to warn Alice’s teacher before she meets my daughter herself. Quite simply, things are not going to be easy. So let her pay attention to a number of completely truthful accounts of my daughter’s experiences and adventures in various places of the Earth and space over the last three years.

  On the Dialing of Random Numbers

  Alice would not go to sleep. It was ten O’clock already and she would not go to sleep. I said:

  “Alice, you must go to sleep now, or else I….”

  “Or else what, papa?”

  “Or else I shall call Baba Yaga.”

  “And who is Baba Yaga?”

  “Hmm… That is something all children have to learn. Baba Yaga is the Wicked Witch of the North! She lives in a giant castle on stilts made out of chicken leg bones. She’s an evil old woman who eats small children… Disobedient small children…”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because she’s evil and hungry!”

  “But why is she hungry?”

  “Because there are no stores nearby, and no food service to her castle.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the castle is too old and it’s too far away in the forest.”

  Alice had become so interested she even sat up in bed.

  “Does she work in the nature preserve?”

  “Alice, go to sleep immediately!”

  “But you promised to call Baba Yaga! Please, papa, please call Baba Yaga!”

  “I will call her. But you will be very sorry that I did!”

  I walked over to the videophone unit and punched out a few numbers at random. I was certain there would be no connection and that Baba Yaga would not be home.

  But I was mistaken. The videophone screen lit up, there was a buzzing someone had pressed the ACCEPT button at the other end of the line, and hadn’t even appeared in person on the screen when a deep voice said:

  “Martian Embassy. May we be of service?”

  “Is it her, papa? Is it her?” Alice cried from her bed.

  “She’s already gone to bed.” I said sternly.

  “Martian Embassy here. May we be of service?” The voice repeated.

  I turned to face the videophone. A young Martian was looking out at me. He had green eyes, and no eyelashes.

  “I’m sorry.” I said. “Rather clearly I have the wrong number.”

  The Martian laughed. He was looking not at me, but at something behind my back. Alice, naturally, had jumped out of her bed and was standing barefoot on the floor.

  “Good evening.” She said to the Martian.

  “Good evening, little girl.”

  “Does Baba Yaga live with you?”

  The Martian cast a questioning look in my direction.

  “You see,” I said, “Alice won’t go to sleep, and I was hoping to get through to Baba Yaga and have her punish her. But I got a wrong number.”

  The Martian laughed again.

  “Good night, Alice.” He said. “You have to go to sleep now, or your papa will call Baba Yaga.”

  The Martian said good bye to me and hung up.

  “Well, now are you going to go to sleep?” I asked. “You heard what your uncle from Mars said…”

  “I’ll go sleep, papa. Are you going to take me to Mars?”

  “If you are a good little girl and behave yourself we’ll go to Mars in the summer.”

  At long last Alice tell asleep, and I went back to my work. I was at my desk until one o’clock in the morning. And suddenly there was a deafening ringing from the videophone. I pressed the ACCEPT button. The Martian from the Embassy looked out at me.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you at such a late hour.” He said. “But your videophone was not turned off for the night, and I concluded you had yet to go to bed.”

  “No bother.”

  “Then is sit possible you can help us?” The Martian said. “The whole Embassy can’t get to sleep. We’ve poured over the encyclopedias, gone through all the phone books, but we still can’t find out who Baba Yaga is and where she lives…”

  Bronty

  They brought a Brontosaurus egg to us at the Moscow Space Zoo. Some Chilean tourists found the egg after a landslide on the shores of the Yenisei River. The egg was nearly round and miraculously preserved by the eternal cold. When the specialists started to study it they noticed it appeared to be quite fresh, and so we decided to place it in the Zoo’s egg incubator.

  Certainly no one expected success, but after no more than a week the X-Rays and ultrasound equipment showed us a developing, growing Brontosaurus embryo. No sooner had the news hit the info services and the Net scientists and correspondents began to pour into Moscow from all over. We had to reserve the whole eighty story Venusian Arms Hotel on Tver Street, and that wasn’t enough to house them all. I had eight Turkish paleontologists sleeping like sardines in my dining room not to mention the journalist from Equador in the kitchen and the two women
correspondents from “Antarctic Woman” who set up housekeeping in Alice’s bed room.

  When my wife phoned in the evening from Nikos, where she was overseeing the construction of a stadium, she had decided not to come home for a while.

  All the world’s newsfeeds were showing The Egg. The Egg from the side. The Egg from the front. A skeleton of a brontosaurus superimposed on the Egg…

  A whole visiting Congress of Cosmolinguists came for a mass visit to the Zoo. But by that time we had cut off access to the incubator and the philologists had to content themselves with the polar bears and the Martian Mantises.

  On the forty-sixth day of this madness the egg began to suddenly shake and shudder. My friend Professor Yakata and I were at that moment beside the hood which sheltered the egg with tea cups in our hands. We had already given up hope that anything would ever come out of the egg alive. We had been forced to halt the x-rays and other scanners because of the likelihood of damaging our ‘baby,’ And we hadn’t been able to predict the date and time of the delivery in as much as no one in the world prior to this had so far managed to deliver brontosaurs into the world..

  And now, suddenly, the egg shook and shook, then it broke with a crack and through the thick leathery shell of the Egg a black, snake-like head began to emerge. The automatic cameras and data recorders began to click like mad. I knew that a red light had gone on over the door to the incubator room outside. Throughout the area of the Zoo something approaching panic took hold.

  Five minutes later we were surrounded by everyone who had a right to be here and anyone who was able to find a spot and wanted in. It became very warm and very stuffy.

  At last the small brontosaur forced its way completely out of the egg.

  “Papa, what’s he called?” I suddenly heard a familiar voice.

  “Alice!” I was shocked. “How did you get in here?”

  “I came with the correspondents.”

  “Children cannot come in here.”

  “I can. I told everyone I was your daughter. They let me through.”

  “Don’t you know it isn’t very nice to use the people you know for private ends?”

  “But papa! Bronty’s so small; he’ll be bored without other children. So I came too.”

  I could only throw up my hands. I didn’t have a minute free or I would have escorted Alice from the incubator myself, and there was no one around who would have agreed to do it for me either.

  “Just stay right here and don’t go anywhere.” I told her, and I headed for the hood covering the newborn brontosaur.

  All that evening Alice an Is aid absolutely nothing to each other. I utterly forbade her to go anywhere near the incubator, but she just said to me, as though she had not heard a word that I said, “I feel so sorry for Bronty,” and the very next day she was right beside the incubator again. Some of the space men from the Jupiter-8 mission brought her. The space men were heros, and no one was going to refuse them anything.

  “Good morning, Bronty.” She said, standing right next to the hood.

  The baby brontosaur looked at her with a squint.

  “Whose is that child?” Professor Yakata asked me. I tried to make myself invisible and failed..

  But Alice was not one to slink away at mere words.

  “Don’t you like me?” She parried.

  “Oh no, it’s not that. Quite the contrary. I just was thinking, er, that maybe, hm, you had gotten lost….” The professor was quite unable to carry on a conversation with a little girl.

  “Too bad.” Alice said. “But I’ll be back tomorrow to see you, Bronty. Don’t be bored.”

  And Alice did in fact come back the next day, and she came nearly every day. Everyone liked her and let her through without a word. I quite washed my hands of the matter. After all, our house sits right next to the Zoo and, we could hardly bar the road or build a wall.

  Brontosaurs grow very quickly. After only a month his was two and a half meters long, and we moved him to a specially constructed pavilion. The young brontosaur roamed throughout the fenced enclosure and munched on young bamboo shoots and bananas. The bamboo was brought in on the freight rocket from India but the bananas came from local hothouses. We put a cement wading pool in the middle of the enclosure and filled it with hot, salty water. The baby dinosaur loved it.

  Then suddenly he lost his appetite. For three days he left the bananas and bamboo untouched. By the fourth day the brontosaur lay on the bottom of the pool and rested his small black head on the plastic rim. Everyone could see he was getting ready to die. This was something we could not permit to happen. There was only one brontosaur in all the world, and we had him. The best doctors in the world helped us. But all in vain. Bronty refused grass, vitamins, oranges, milk… Everything!

  Alice knew nothing of this tragedy. I had sent her off to her grandmother’s at Vnukovo. But on the fourth day she happened to turn on the television just at the moment when the news about the brontosaur’s worsening health was read. I still don’t know how she convinced her grandmother, but non the same morning Alice ran into the pavilion.

  “Papa!” She shouted. “How could you not tell me? How could you?”

  “Later, Alice, later.” I answered. “We’re having a meeting.”

  We were in fact having a meeting at the time. It had been going on for the last three days.

  Alice said nothing more and ran out. And a few minutes later I heard a great deal of gasping, ooh-ing, and ah-ing from close by. I turned and saw that Alice had already crossed through the barrier, wormed her way into the enclosure and had run up to the brontosaur’s head. She had a bulky roll from lunch counter in one hand.

  “Eat, Bronty.” She said. “Or you’ll starve yourself to death here. If I were living here, I’d get sick of bananas too.”

  I hadn’t even made it to the barrier when something unbelievable happened. Something which was greatly to Alice’s credit and which strongly soiled our, the biologists, reputations.

  The brontosaur lifted his head, looked at Alice, and carefully took the dinner roll in her hands.

  “Don’t make so much noise, Papa.” Alice waved her finger at me. She had seen me frozen, half way across the barrier. “Bronty’s afraid of you.”

  “He won’t do anything to her.” Professor Yakata said.

  I could see for myself that the dinosaur wasn’t doing anything. But what would happen if her grandmother came on this scene?

  Afterwards the scientists argued the point endlessly. Some said Bronty just needed a change of diet, while others that he just trusted Alice more than he trusted us. Whatever the reason, the crisis ended.

  Now Bronty has become entirely domesticated. Although he is now more than thirty meters long he likes nothing better than to take Alice for a ride. One of my assistants has constructed a special saddle and when Alice comes to the pavilion Bronty inserts his enormous neck into the corner and takes in his triangular teeth the saddle standing there and carefully lifts it to his shiny black back. Then he and Alice go for a ride around the pavilion or go swimming in the pool.

  The Tewteqs

  As I had promised Alice I took her along when I went to Mars for a conference.

  The flight was uneventful. True, I do not take weightlessness well and therefore preferred to keep to the acceleration couch, but my daughter spent all her time flitting around the ship and once I was called to remove her from ceiling of the control room because she had wanted to press the red button the one for emergency deceleration. But the pilots were not really very angry with her.

  On Mars we looked around the city, went with a tour group into the desert and even visited the Grand Cavern. But after this I had no more time to be with my daughter and I took her to the local boarding school for the week. A great many specialists from Earth work on Mars, and the Martians have helped us construct an enormous dome for a children’s camp. The camp is a fine place there are real Earth trees growing there. Sometimes the kids go on excursions.

  When th
ey do, they wear their own space suits and walk in a file down the street.

  Tatiana Petrovna that was the name of the headmistress said that I could leave her there without a worry. Alice also told me not to worry. And I said good-bye to her for the week.

  On the third day Alice disappeared.

  It was a totally extraordinary event. To begin with, in all the years the boarding school had been in operation it had never lost, or even mislaid, a single child for more than ten minutes. It was totally impossible to get lost in the city on Mars. Let alone an Earth child, in a space helmet. The first Martian who saw him would bring him back to the school. Not to mention the robots. And the police. No, getting lost on Mars is completely impossible. But Alice had done it.

  She had been nowhere to be seen for about two hours when I was summoned from the conference and brought to the boarding school in a martian walker. I must have looked utterly distraught when I cycled through the airlock into the dome everyone gathered there froze and were absolutely silent. And just who wasn’t there! All the teachers and the schools robots, the ten Martians in space helmets (they had to wear helmets when they went into the dome where there was an Earth atmosphere) space men, the emergency search team chief Nazaryan, archeologists…

  It turned out the city-net and entertainment channels had for the last three hours been broadcasting news that an Earth child had vanished. The whole videophone system was being used to broadcast the emergency. The Martian schools had closed and the school children had gone out in groups combing the city and surroundings…

  Alice’s disappearance was noticed as soon as her group returned from its walk. Since then two hours had passed. The oxygen in her helmet was sufficient for three hours.

  I, knowing my daughter, asked if they had looked in the secluded spots in the school itself, or right next to the building. Quite possibly she