Microcosmic God

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Some six years before Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) supplied the term grok to the counterculture for a brief currency, Sturgeon’s SF novel More Than Human gave a word to a circle of young readers (which included me) meant to combine aspects of blending and meshing: blesh. Perhaps it was simply because of my age, but grok—especially after someone (James Blish?) noted that its meaning was practically identical to the then-current meaning (it changes yearly) of the jazz term dig—somehow never entered my vocabulary.

  Blesh did.

  I still have to stop myself, now and then, from writing it down in the flow of the most formal nonfiction. And forty-five years after the publication of the novel in which it first appeared, a few friends of mine still use the term in conversation.

  But I think this sound-image, bleshing, this order of communitas always on the verge of communion, expresses an inchoate need in the American psyche; as well, it relates to a gallery of images that recur through Sturgeon’s texts. And the other single word—the biological image that the Sturgeon reader (and apparently for a while Sturgeon as well) most easily groups that gallery of images around as a metaphorical center—is, of course, the word denied in the title of one tale, explained in the text of another, and referred to in passing in any number of others: “syzygy.”

  Sturgeon himself describes it for one-celled organisms in “It Wasn’t Syzygy”: “Two of these organisms let their nuclei flow together for a time. Then they separate and go their ways again. It isn’t a reproductive process at all. It’s merely a way in which each may gain a part of the other.” For biological accuracy, we can add that the cell walls merge and that cytoplasm as well as nucleoplasm, exchanges. After they separate, both cells quickly undergo fission twice (resulting in eight organisms). Although syzygy is not a reproductive process, besides allowing genetic mixing it triggers reproduction through two generations.

  Looking at the range and power of this communion as it is presented again and again throughout Sturgeon’s work, certainly I see love as one of its most important forms. Yet what has always struck me vis-á-vis Sturgeon’s assertion is how much larger than love—love in any form I can recognize it—this communion is always turning out to be. It is almost always moving toward the larger-than-life, the cosmic, the mystical. In a number of places in Sturgeon’s work—More Than Human, The Cosmic Rape—it comes to be one with evolution itself.

  Dealing with such an awesome communion, Sturgeon might well want to keep himself oriented toward love. It would be rather heady, if not horrifying, to explore that communion without such a fixed point to home on—though a few times Sturgeon has given us a portrait of this communion with the orientation toward hate (“Die, Maestro, Die!” and “Mr. Costello, Hero”), and these are among his most powerful stories. Certainly the relationships presented in “Bianca’s Hands” and “Bright Segment” begin as love; but although neither ever loses the name, both, by the end of their respective tales, have developed into something far more terrifying. Yet the intensity of effect, finally, allies that dark version to the brighter one of such tales as, say, “The (Widget), the (Wadget), and Boff’ or “Make Room for Me.”

  Artists outgrow their terminology (not to mention their metaphors), and Sturgeon would soon leave syzygy behind—first as a word, then as a concept. But for the reader, the image of merging cells, fused in some imponderable union, closer than sex, with many aspects of sex about it but ultimately a replacement for sex among the essentially asexual, is a microstructure rich enough to begin organizing around it readings of the larger and more varied communions Sturgeon presents in one form or another in almost every tale.

  Sturgeon wanted a world that worked differently from the one we live in; and that difference was that it had a place for love and logic both. What seemed to bolster him and give him personal patience and also artistic perseverance was his apprehension of the interconnectedness of all life’s varied and variegated aspects.

  For all the brilliance of its accomplishment, Sturgeon’s career was by no means smooth or easy. He had three marriages (the second was annulled), two more long-term relationships, and seven children. Financially, there were times when he approached the level of middle class comfort, but not many. And his writing was broken by several extended periods when he could not write at all—even so much as a letter. Such periods were financially disastrous and deeply painful to the man—even as they troubled his readers. Because Sturgeon was as popular as he was, at the merest mention of a story or book idea from him, editors would rush into print with an announcement of a book or a story forthcoming, that finally would never appear. (The long, late tale “When You Care, When You Love” was trumpeted as the first section of a novel—never finished. And a tale called “Tandy’s Story” that appeared in Galaxy in 1961 was supposed to be one of a series, one named for each of his children—never completed.)

  There’s a story that Sturgeon has told about himself and that others have repeated.

  In the early fifties, during the midst of one of Sturgeon’s several blocked periods, Galaxy editor Horace L. Gold finally broke through it. Sturgeon had explained to Gold that he was worrying so much about the terrifying oppression and fear emanating from Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was investigating “un-American” activity and destroying lives and reputations left and right in the process, Sturgeon couldn’t bring himself to write a story that was simple entertainment. Unless it was something that told the world exactly how he felt about this evil madman, Sturgeon asked, how could he write anything. But a good story, he knew, couldn’t simply be a sermon or a political Jeremiad.

  Gold thought a moment, then responded: “You write me a story about a man who goes to meet his wife at a bus station to surprise her and who sees her come through the gate smiling at another man—and every Galaxy reader in the country will know exactly how you feel about that Washington demagogue.”

  The story with which Sturgeon responded, the story that ended his blocked period, was “Mr. Costello, Hero”—a beautifully indirect, yet scapularly astute, examination into the workings of “political” evil. But what Gold had perceived was, of course, precisely the interconnectedness (the communion) I referred to—the historically sensitive web on which the finest art plays its times in order to sound the richest music.

  Sturgeon told the tale as a lesson on how to end writer’s block.

  But what he was too modest to say, and what I’m happy to be able to add, is that, for all its truth, I doubt there are very many writers to whom Gold would have given this advice.

  Myself, I can only think of one.

  And that is certainly one reason why, to us, today, Sturgeon is of such pristine and gemlike value.

  Samuel R. Delany

  New York, 1995

  Cargo

  I HEARD SOMEBODY SAY she was haunted. She wasn’t haunted. There’s another name for what ailed her, and I’ll tell you about it if you like. I was aboard her when it started, and before. I knew every sheared rivet on her. I knew her when she was honest, a drab and prosaic member of our merchant marine. I saw what happened to her.

  She was one of those broad-shouldered old hulks built by the dozen during War I. Her sisters lay rotting and rusting and waiting for a national emergency to prove their unseaworthiness. O.K. They make good shrapnel. Her name was Dawnlight, she was seven thousand tons, a black oil tanker, limped like a three-legged dog, and was as beautiful as a wart. She could do nine knots downhill with a fair wind and an impossible current. When she was loaded she steered well until the loss of weight from burned fuel in the after bunkers threw her down by the head, and then she proceeded as will any tanker with a loss back aft; when she was light she drew seventeen feet aft and nothing forward, so that when the wind blew abeam she spun on her tail like a canoe.

  Yes, I knew her of old. She used to carry casing-head. That’s airplane gas that makes explosive vapors at around 40° F. So one day a fireman found casing-head seeping through the seams of No. 9 tank into the firer
oom and evaporating there. He fainted dead away, and the crew took to the boats during the night. The Old Man woke up at noon the next day screaming for his coffee, put two and two together, and with the help of two engineers and a messman, worked her into a cove in a small island off Cuba.

  It so happened that a very wealthy gentleman thereabouts turned up with a nice offer, with the result that the Old Man and his three finks made for Havana in a lifeboat with their pockets full of large bills and the ship’s log, which contained an entry describing her explosion and sinking. After that she carried crude oil for the wealthy gentleman to war zones. Great sport.

  What made it such great sport was that not only did the Dawnlight have no business being afloat, but she had no business being in her particular business. Her nationality was determined by the contents of the flag locker, and her current log looked like a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They’d run up one flag or another, and pick a log to suit.

  But she paid well and she fed well, and if you could keep away from the ocean floor and the concentration camps, you’d find her good shipping. If you must commit suicide, you might as well get rich doing it.

  I caught her in a certain drydock that makes a good thing of doing quick work and asking few questions. Her skipper was a leathery old squarehead whose viscera must have been a little brown jug. Salt cracked off his joints when he moved. He was all man back aft and all devil on the bridge, and he owned our souls. Not that that was much of a possession. The crew matched the ship, and they were the crummiest, crustiest, hard-bitten bunch of has-been human beings ever to bless the land by going to sea. Had to be that way.

  Any tanker is a five-hundred-foot stick of dynamite, even if she isn’t an outlaw. If she’s loaded, she’ll burn forever and a week; and if she’s light she’ll go sky-high and never come down. All she needs is a spark from somewhere. That can happen easily enough any time; but imagine dodging subs and pocket battleships on both sides of the martial fence—swift, deadly back-stabbers, carrying many and many a spark for our cargoes. We had nothing for protection but luck and the Old Man. We stuck to him.

  The Dawnlight was the only ship I’d have taken, feeling the way I was. Once in a while the world gangs up on a guy, and he wants an out. The Dawnlight was mine—she’d pulled me through a couple of dark spots in the past—once when a certain dope fell and cracked his silly skull in a brawl over a girl, and I had to disappear for a while, and once when I married the girl and she took to blackmailing me for a living. Aside from all this, though, the Dawnlight was the only ship I could get aboard. I carried an ordinary seaman’s certificate, indorsed for wiper. The Department of Commerce was very lenient with me and let me keep those ratings after I ran a naval auxiliary tanker on the rocks. Passed out drunk on watch. Anyhow, the Old Man gave me the eight-to-twelve watch as third mate, papers or no papers. It was that kind of ship. He was that kind of a skipper. He had the idea I was that kind of a sailor.

  We left the drydock (it’s up North somewhere—that’ll do!) and headed east and south. We were in ballast, carrying only two hundred big cases of farm machinery in the two dry cargo holds. Farm machinery with steel-jacketed noses and percussion caps. Nice chunky crates of tractors with rifled barrels. We followed the coastline pretty much, but stayed far off, out of the southbound steamer lanes. This wasn’t long after the beginning of the war, when all hands ashore and afloat were excited about neutrality zones, so we wanted to keep our noses clean. However, we weren’t too worried. We weren’t the only gray-painted unidentified hulk at sea by any means, and anyway, we had the skipper.

  We dropped down to about 33° and headed due east. It was early fall—the hurricane season—but the weather was fine and mellow. We kept the morning sun a point off the starboard bow, and in the evening we tore up the base of the shadow we threw ahead. The black gang talked of an unheard-of sixty-three revolutions per minute from the engine, when she hadn’t done better than fifty-seven in the last twelve years. Every time I shot the sun or a star on my watch, the ship stood still and waited for me to get it, and I navigated as if I had a radio beam in my pocket. It didn’t seem like the old Dawnlight any more, with her rotten gear and her chewing-gum calking. It was a pleasure to work her. Even Cajun Joe’s sea bread stopped giving me heartburn.

  Yes, it was too good to be true, so in the long run it didn’t turn out to be true. After we reached longitude 30° everything about that ship went haywire. Nothing was really wrong, only—well, there was the matter of the sextants, for instance. Four of them—mine, and the first’s, and the second’s, but worst of all, the Old Man’s ancient binocular-type monster. They all went just a little bit off—enough to throw us eight or ten degrees off course. You see, after we passed 30°, we changed course a shade north to head us up toward Gibraltar; and no sooner had we done that than clouds popped up from nowhere and the weather got really thick.

  Nights we sailed in a black soup, and days we sailed in a white one, and the compass was the only thing that would even admit where we might be. Things got screwy. The revolution counter said we were making a wabbly seven point two knots. The patent log claimed an even six. But it wasn’t until the third day of fog, about five bells on my morning watch, that we really found out that we were being led astray. About the sextants, I mean.

  There was a hole in the clouds, high on the starboard beam; I saw it coming up, figured it would show the sun, and whistled up the Old Man and the mate. I was right; it was a small hole, and as the three of us lined up on the wing of the bridge with our sextants, the second came bumbling sleepily up with his. Old Johnny Weiss was at the wheel, steadying the lubberline onto the compass card the way only an old shellback trained in sail can steer a ship.

  “Watch the clock, Johnny,” I said and got the image of that cloud hole on my mirror.

  “Hi,” he said, which was the nearest any of us came to “Aye-aye, sir” on that scow.

  We froze there, the four of us, each sextant steady as a rock, waiting for the gleam. It came, and the Old Man said “Hup!” and we fixed our arcs.

  We got the time from Johnny—the old clock in the wheelhouse was chronometer enough for us—and we broke out our tables. Our four sights came out close enough. Position, 31°17′N, 33°9′40″W—which landed us about four hundred miles due east of the Madeiras. We found that if we split the distance between the distance-run given by the deck and engine logs, we’d reach that position by dead reckoning. It looked good—too good. The Dawnlight was balky steering, what with her outmoded hydraulic telemotor and her screw-type steering engine. She’d never performed that way.

  As soon as I was alone in the chart house I went over my figures. Everything was jake, but—the primary mirror on my sextant was askew. Slipped down a bit in its frame. Why, a thing like that could prove us a hundred and fifty miles off course! It had never happened before—it was a new sextant, and I took care of it. Now how in—

  I slipped down to the Old Man’s office and went in. He and the mate were bent over the desk. They straightened as I came in.

  “Cap’n I—”

  “Vot reading dit you get on your sun gun?” he asked me before I could finish my speech. I told him. He scratched his head and looked at the mate.

  The mate said: “Yeah, me, too.” He was a Boston Irishman named Toole; four foot eleven in his shoes. He was wanted for four very elaborate murders. He collected seventeenth-century miniatures. “I got the same thing, only my sextant’s on the bum. That couldn’t be right. Look—the eyepiece on the ‘scope is off center.”

  “Look now here.” The Old Man took down his behemoth and showed me a gradation plate sliding around loosely over its pulled rivets. “Yust py accident I gat the same.”

  “My gosh! That’s what I came down to tell you, skipper. Look at this.” I showed him the loose mirror on my instrument.

  Just then Harry, the second mate, edged into the room. He always edged through doors on the mistaken assumption that he was thinner fore and aft than he was a
cross the beam. It was hard to tell. Harry saw everything and said nothing, and if he was as innocent as he hugely looked, he would not have been aboard the Dawnlight. He said:

  “Cap, m’ readin’ on that sight was off. My sextant—”

  “—hass gone gebrochen. Don’t tell me dis too.”

  “Why … yeh. Yeh.”

  “Four sextants go exactly the same amount off at the same time for four different reasons,” said Toole, examining a bent arc track on Harry’s sun gun. The captain sighed.

  No one said anything for a minute, and we hardly noticed it when the captain’s deck lamp winked off. The engine room speaking tube shrieked and I answered it because I was the nearest. I heard:

  “Skipper?”

  “Third mate.”

  “Tell the Old Man that No. 2 generator just threw its armature. Cracked the casing all to hell.”

  “What’s the matter with No. 1?”

  “Damfino. Fused solid two hours ago. And no spares for anything, and no cable to wind a new armature.”

  “O.K.” I turned and told the skipper.

  He almost laughed. “I vas yust going to say dot ve’d haf to take a radio bearing on Gibraltar and Feisal. Heh. Didn’t y’u tell me, ‘Arry, dot dere vas no acid for the batteries on the radio?”

  “I did.”

  “Heh.” The skipper drummed for a moment on his desk, looking at me without seeing me. Then he saw me. “Vot de dirty hell are y’u duing down here ven y’u’re on vatch? Gat up dere!”

  I got—there were times when you couldn’t play around with the old boy.

  Up on deck the weather looked the same. The sea was slick and the air was warm, and I had to fumble around to locate the bridge ladder. Johnny was steering steadily, easily, a couple of spokes each way every couple of minutes. He was the only man aboard that had the feel of that crazy ship, with her warped keel and her scored and twisted propeller. He looked up at me as I stepped into the wheelhouse and grunted.