“Good morning.”
“Oh, god—dam!” he barked. “You made me bite my tongue. I thought you’d gone.”
“I had.” She kneeled in the shadows, her back against the inner wall, facing the atrium. “But then I stopped to be with the tree for a while.”
“Then what?”
“I thought a lot.”
“What about?”
“You.”
“Did you now?”
“Look,” she said firmly. “I’m not going to any doctor to get this thing checked out. I didn’t want to leave until I had told you that and until I was sure you believed me.”
“Come on in and we’ll get something to eat.”
Foolishly, she giggled.
“I can’t. My feet are asleep.”
Without hesitation he scooped her up in his arms and carried her around the atrium.
She asked, her arm around his shoulders and their faces close, “Do you believe me?”
He continued around until they reached the wooden chest, then stopped and looked into her eyes.
“I believe you. I don’t know why you decided as you did but I’m willing to believe you.”
He sat her down on the chest and stood back.
“It’s that act of faith you mentioned,” she said gravely.
“I thought you ought to have it at least once in your life so you can never say again what you said.” She tapped her heels gingerly against the slate floor. “Ow!” She made a pained smile. “Pins and needles.”
“You must have been thinking for a long time.”
“Yes. Want more?”
“Sure.”
“You are an angry, frightened man.”
He seemed delighted.
“Tell me about all that!”
“No,” she said quietly. “You tell me. I’m very serious about this. Why are you angry?”
“I’m not.”
“Why are you so angry?”
“I tell you I’m not. Although,” he added good-na-turedly, “you’re pushing me in that direction.”
“Well then, why?”
He gazed at her for what to her seemed a very long time indeed.
“You really want to know, don’t you?”
She nodded.
He waved a sudden hand, up and out.
“Where do you suppose all this came from—the house, the land, the equipment?”
She waited.
“An exhaust system,” he said, with a thickening of his voice she was coming to know. “A way of guiding exhaust gases out of internal combustion engines in such a way that they are given a spin. Unburned solids are embedded in the walls of the muffler in a glass wool liner that slips out in one piece and can be replaced by a clean one every couple of thousand miles. The rest of the exhaust is fired by its own spark plug and what will bum, burns.
The heat is used to preheat the fuel. The rest is spun again through a five-thousand-mile cartridge. What finally gets out is, by today’s standards at least, pretty clean. And because of the preheating it actually gets better mileage out of the engine.”
“So you’ve made a lot of money.”
“I made a lot of money,” he echoed. “But not because the thing is being used to cut down air pollution. I got the money because an automobile company bought it and buried it in a vault. They don’t like it because it costs something to install in new cars. Some .friends of theirs in the refining business don’t like it because it gets high performance out of crude fuels. Well, all right1 didn’t know any better and I won’t make the same mistake again. But yes I’m angry. I was angry when I was a kid on a tank ship and we were set to washing down a bulk-head with chipped brown soap and canvas. I went ashore and bought a detergent and tried it and it was better, faster and cheaper, so I took it to the bos’n, who gave me a punch in the mouth for pretending to know his job better than he did. Well, he was drunk at the time but the rough part came when the old shellbacks in the crew gauged up on me for being what they called a ‘company man that’s a dirty name in a ship. I just couldn’t understand why people got in the way of something better.
“I’ve been up against that all my life. I have something in my head that just won’t quit. It’s a way I have of asking the next question: why is so-and-so the way it is?
Why can’t it be such-and-such instead? There is always another question to be asked about anything or any situa-tionespecially you shouldn’t quit when you like an answer because there’s always another one after it. And we live in a world where people just don’t want to ask the next question!
“I’ve been paid all my stomach will take for things people won’t use and if I’m mad all the time, it’s really my fault—I admit it—because I just can’t stop asking that next question ‘and coming up with answers. There are a half-dozen real block-busters in ‘that lab that nobody will ever see and half a hundred more in my head. But what can you do in a world where people would rather kill each other in a desert, even when they’re shown it can turn green and bloom—where they’ll fall all over themselves to pour billions into developing a new oil strike when it’s been proved over and over again that ‘the fossil fuels will kill us all? Yes, I’m angry. Shouldn’t I be?”
She let the echoes of his voice swirl around the court and out through the hole in the top of the atrium and waited a little longer to let him know he was here with her and not beside himself and his fury. He grinned at her sheepishly when he came to this.
And she said, “Maybe you’re asking the next question instead of asking the right question. I think people who live by wise old sayings are trying not to ‘think—but I know one worth paying some attention to. It’s this. If you ask a question the right way, you’ve just given the answer.” She went on, “I mean, if you put your hand on a hot stove you might ask yourself, how can I stop my hand from burning? And the answer is pretty clear, isn’t it? If the world keeps rejecting what you have to give—there’s some way of asking why that contains the answer.”
“It’s a simple answer,” he said shortly. “People are stupid.”
“That isn’t the answer and you know it,” she said.
“What is?”
“Oh, I can’t tell you that! All I know is that the way you do something, where people are concerned, is more important than what you do. If you want results, I mean you already know how to get what you want with ‘the tree, don’t you?”
“I’ll be damned.”
“People are living, growing things, too. I don’t know a hundredth part of what you do about bonsai but I do know this—when you start one, it isn’t often the strong straight healthy ones you take. It’s the twisted sick ones that can be made the most beautiful. When you get to shaping humanity, you might remember that.”
“Of all the—I don’t know whether to laugh in your face or punch you right in the mouth!”
She rose. He hadn’t realized she was quite this tall.
“I’d better go.”
“Come on now. You know a figure of speech when you hear one.”
“Oh, I didn’t feel threatened. But—I’d better go, all the same.”
Shrewdly he asked her, “Are you .afraid to ask the next question?”
“Terrified.”
“Ask it anyway.”
“No.”
“Then III do it for you. You said I was angryand ‘afraid. You want to know what I’m afraid of.”
“Yes.”
“You. I am scared to death of you.”
“Are you really?”
“You have a way of provoking honesty,” he said with some difficulty. “I’ll say what I know you’re thinking: I’m afraid of any close human relationship. I’m afraid of something I can’t take apart with a screwdriver or a mass spec-troscope or a table of cosines and tangents. I don’t know how to handle it.”
His voice was jocular but his hands were shaking.
“You do it by watering one side,” she said softly, “or by turning it just so in the sun. You hand
le it as if it were a living thing, like a species or a woman or a bonsai.
It will be what you want it to be if you let it be itself and take the time and the care.”
“I think,” he said, “that you are making me some kind of offer. Why?”
“Sitting there most of the night,” she said, “I had a crazy kind of image. Do you think two sick twisted ‘trees ever made bonsai out of one another?”
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
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Document creation date: 31.3.2012
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Theodore Sturgeon
Spider Robinson
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Slow Sculpture: Volume XII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon Page 3