A Saucer of Loneliness
Page 1
Theodore Sturgeon with his children Robin, Tandy, and Noël on Grenada Island, West Indies 1958.
Copyright © 2000 the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. Previously published materials copyright © 1953, 1954 by Theodore Sturgeon and the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without written permission of the publisher.
Published by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712
Cover art by Ed Emshwiller
A Saucer of Loneliness is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.
North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.
eISBN: 978-1-58394-751-7
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Sturgeon, Theodore.
A saucer of loneliness / Theodore Sturgeon: edited by Paul Williams
p. cm. — (The complete stories of Theodore Sturgeon ; v. 7)
Contents: A saucer of loneliness — The touch of your hand — The world well lost — And my fear is great — The wages of synergy — The dark room — Talent — A way of thinking — The silken swift — The clinic — Mr. Costello, hero — The education of Drusilla Strange.
1. Science fiction, American. I. Williams, Paul, 1948– II. Title. III. Series: Sturgeon, Theodore. Short stories: v. 7.
GV1149.5.C6 C54 2000
PS3569.T875 A6 2000
813′.54—dc21 00-042356
v3.1
EDITOR’S NOTE
THEODORE HAMILTON STURGEON was born February 26, 1918, and died May 8, 1985. This is the seventh of a series of volumes that will collect all of his short fiction of all types and all lengths shorter than a novel. The volumes and the stories within the volumes are organized chronologically by order of composition (insofar as it can be determined). This seventh volume contains stories written between autumn 1952 and autumn 1953.
Preparation of each of these volumes would not be possible without the hard work and invaluable participation of Noël Sturgeon, Debbie Notkin, and our publishers, Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. I would also like to thank, for their significant assistance with this volume, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Carol Emshwiller, the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust, Marion Sturgeon, Jayne Williams, Ralph Vicinanza, Nicole George, Paula Morrison, Catherine Campaigne, Jennifer Privateer, Eric Weeks, Robin Sturgeon, Kim Charnovsky, T. V. Reed, and all of you who have expressed your interest and support.
BOOKS BY THEODORE STURGEON
Without Sorcery (1948)
The Dreaming Jewels [aka The Synthetic Man] (1950)
More Than Human (1953)
E Pluribus Unicorn (1953)
Caviar (1955)
A Way Home (1955)
The King and Four Queens (1956)
I, Libertine (1956)
A Touch of Strange (1958)
The Cosmic Rape [aka To Marry Medusa] (1958)
Aliens 4 (1959)
Venus Plus X (1960)
Beyond (1960)
Some of Your Blood (1961)
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)
The Player on the Other Side (1963)
Sturgeon in Orbit (1964)
Starshine (1966)
The Rare Breed (1966)
Sturgeon Is Alive and Well … (1971)
The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon (1972)
Sturgeon’s West (with Don Ward) (1973)
Case and the Dreamer (1974)
Visions and Venturers (1978)
Maturity (1979)
The Stars Are the Styx (1979)
The Golden Helix (1979)
Alien Cargo (1984)
Godbody (1986)
A Touch of Sturgeon (1987)
The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff (1989)
Argyll (1993)
Star Trek, The Joy Machine (with James Gunn) (1996)
THE COMPLETE STORIES SERIES
1. The Ultimate Egoist (1994)
2. Microcosmic God (1995)
3. Killdozer! (1996)
4. Thunder and Roses (1997)
5. The Perfect Host (1998)
6. Baby Is Three (1999)
7. A Saucer of Loneliness (2000)
8. Bright Segment (2002)
9. And Now the News … (2003)
10. The Man Who Lost the Sea (2005)
11. The Nail and the Oracle (2007)
12. Slow Sculpture (2009)
13. Case and the Dreamer (2010)
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Editor’s Note
Other Books By This Author
Foreword by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
A Saucer of Loneliness
The Touch of Your Hand
The World Well Lost
… And My Fear Is Great …
The Wages of Synergy
The Dark Room
Talent
A Way of Thinking
The Silken-Swift
The Clinic
Mr. Costello, Hero
The Education of Drusilla Strange
Story Notes by Paul Williams
FOREWORD
I CREATED A CHARACTER, Kilgore Trout, an impoverished, uncelebrated science fiction writer, who made his debut in 1965 in my novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Trout would subsequently make cameo appearances in several more of my books, and in 1973 would star in Breakfast of Champions.
Persons alert for wordplay noticed that Trout and Theodore Sturgeon were both named for fish, and that their first names ended with “ore.” They asked me if my friend Ted had been my model for Kilgore.
Answer: Very briefly, and in a way. Kilgore, like Ted when we first met in 1958, was a victim of a hate crime then commonly practiced by the American literary establishment. It wasn’t racism or sexism or ageism. It was “genreism.” Definition: “The unexamined conviction that anyone who wrote science fiction wasn’t really a writer, but rather a geek of some sort.” A genuine geek, of course, is a carnival employee who is displayed in a filthy cage and billed as “The Wild Man from Borneo.”
Genreism was still rampant in late autumn, 1958, when I was living in Barnstable, Mass., on Cape Cod, and Ted and his wife Marion had just rented a house near the water in Truro (also on the Cape), no place to be when winter came. We knew each other’s work, but had never met. Bingo! There we were face-to-face at last, at suppertime in my living room.
Ted had been writing nonstop for days or maybe weeks. He was skinny and haggard, underpaid and unappreciated outside the ghetto science fiction was then. He announced that he was going to do a standing back flip, which he did. He landed on his knees with a crash which shook the whole house. When he got back on his feet, humiliated and laughing in agony, one of the best writers in America was indeed, but only for a moment, my model for Kilgore Trout.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
New York, New York
November 1999
A Saucer of Loneliness
IF SHE’S DEAD, I THOUGHT, I’ll never find her in this white flood of moonlight on the white sea, with the surf seething in and over the pale, pale s
and like a great shampoo. Almost always, suicides who stab themselves or shoot themselves in the heart carefully bare their chests; the same strange impulse generally makes the sea-suicide go naked.
A little earlier, I thought, or later, and there would be shadows for the dunes and the breathing toss of the foam. Now the only real shadow was mine, a tiny thing just under me, but black enough to feed the blackness of the shadow of a blimp.
A little earlier, I thought, and I might have seen her plodding up the silver shore, seeking a place lonely enough to die in. A little later and my legs would rebel against this shuffling trot through sand, the maddening sand that could not hold and would not help a hurrying man.
My legs did give way then and I knelt suddenly, sobbing—not for her; not yet—just for air. There was such a rush about me: wind, and tangled spray, and colors upon colors and shades of colors that were not colors at all but shifts of white and silver. If light like that were sound, it would sound like the sea on sand, and if my ears were eyes, they would see such a light.
I crouched there, gasping in the swirl of it, and a flood struck me, shallow and swift, turning up and outward like flower petals where it touched my knees, then soaking me to the waist in its bubble and crash. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes so they would open again. The sea was on my lips with the taste of tears and the whole white night shouted and wept aloud.
And there she was.
Her white shoulders were a taller curve in the sloping foam. She must have sensed me—perhaps I yelled—for she turned and saw me kneeling there. She put her fists to her temples and her face twisted, and she uttered a piercing wail of despair and fury, and then plunged seaward and sank.
I kicked off my shoes and ran into the breakers, shouting, hunting, grasping at flashes of white that turned to sea-salt and coldness in my fingers. I plunged right past her, and her body struck my side as a wave whipped my face and tumbled both of us. I gasped in solid water, opened my eyes beneath the surface and saw a greenish-white distorted moon hurtle as I spun. Then there was sucking sand under my feet again and my left hand was tangled in her hair.
The receding wave towed her away and for a moment she streamed out from my hand like steam from a whistle. In that moment I was sure she was dead, but as she settled to the sand, she fought and scrambled to her feet.
She hit my ear, wet, hard, and a huge, pointed pain lanced into my head. She pulled, she lunged away from me, and all the while my hand was caught in her hair. I couldn’t have freed her if I had wanted to. She spun to me with the next wave, battered and clawed at me, and we went into deeper water.
“Don’t … don’t … I can’t swim!” I shouted, so she clawed me again.
“Leave me alone,” she shrieked. “Oh, dear God, why can’t you leave” (said her fingernails) “me …” (said her fingernails) “alone!” (said her small hard fist).
So by her hair I pulled her head down tight to her white shoulder; and with the edge of my free hand I hit her neck twice. She floated again, and I brought her ashore.
I carried her to where a dune was between us and the sea’s broad noisy tongue, and the wind was above us somewhere. But the light was as bright. I rubbed her wrists and stroked her face and said, “It’s all right,” and, “There!” and some names I used to have for a dream I had long, long before I ever heard of her.
She lay still on her back with the breath hissing between her teeth, with her lips in a smile which her twisted-tight, wrinkled-sealed eyes made not a smile but a torture. She was well and conscious for many moments and still her breath hissed and her closed eyes twisted.
“Why couldn’t you leave me alone?” she asked at last. She opened her eyes and looked at me. She had so much misery that there was no room for fear. She shut her eyes again and said, “You know who I am.”
“I know,” I said.
She began to cry.
I waited, and when she stopped crying, there were shadows among the dunes. A long time.
She said, “You don’t know who I am. Nobody knows who I am.”
I said, “It was in all the papers.”
“That!” She opened her eyes slowly and her gaze traveled over my face, my shoulders, stopped at my mouth, touched my eyes for the briefest second. She curled her lips and turned away her head. “Nobody knows who I am.”
I waited for her to move or speak, and finally I said, “Tell me.”
“Who are you?” she asked, with her head still turned away.
“Someone who …”
“Well?”
“Not now,” I said. “Later, maybe.”
She sat up suddenly and tried to hide herself. “Where are my clothes?”
“I didn’t see them.”
“Oh,” she said. “I remember. I put them down and kicked sand over them, just where a dune would come and smooth them over, hide them as if they never were … I hate sand. I wanted to drown in the sand, but it wouldn’t let me … You mustn’t look at me!” she shouted. “I hate to have you looking at me!” She threw her head from side to side, seeking. “I can’t stay here like this! What can I do? Where can I go?”
“Here,” I said.
She let me help her up and then snatched her hand away, half-turned from me. “Don’t touch me. Get away from me.”
“Here,” I said again, and walked down the dune where it curved in the moonlight, tipped back into the wind and down and became not dune but beach. “Here.” I pointed behind the dune.
At last she followed me. She peered over the dune where it was chest-high, and again where it was knee-high. “Back there?”
I nodded.
“So dark …” She stepped over the low dune and into the aching black of those moon-shadows. She moved away cautiously, feeling tenderly with her feet, back to where the dune was higher. She sank down into the blackness and disappeared there. I sat on the sand in the light. “Stay away from me,” she spat.
I rose and stepped back. Invisible in the shadows, she breathed, “Don’t go away.” I waited, then saw her hand press out of the clean-cut shadows. “There,” she said, “over there. In the dark. Just be a … Stay away from me now … Be a—voice.”
I did as she asked, and sat in the shadows perhaps six feet from her.
She told me about it. Not the way it was in the papers.
She was perhaps seventeen when it happened. She was in Central Park in New York. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brown slopes had a dusting of green of precisely the consistency of that morning’s hoarfrost on the rocks. But the frost was gone and the grass was brave and tempted some hundreds of pairs of feet from the asphalt and concrete to tread on it.
Hers were among them. The sprouting soil was a surprise to her feet, as the air was to her lungs. Her feet ceased to be shoes as she walked, her body was consciously more than clothes. It was the only kind of day which in itself can make a city-bred person raise his eyes. She did.
For a moment she felt separated from the life she lived, in which there was no fragrance, no silence, in which nothing ever quite fit nor was quite filled. In that moment the ordered disapproval of the buildings around the pallid park could not reach her; for two, three clean breaths it no longer mattered that the whole wide world really belonged to images projected on a screen; to gently groomed goddesses in these steel and glass towers; that it belonged, in short, always, always to someone else.
So she raised her eyes, and there above her was the saucer.
It was beautiful. It was golden, with a dusty finish like that of an unripe Concord grape. It made a faint sound, a chord composed of two tones and a blunted hiss like the wind in tall wheat. It was darting about like a swallow, soaring and dropping. It circled and dropped and hovered like a fish, shimmering. It was like all these living things, but with that beauty it had all the loveliness of things turned and burnished, measured, machined, and metrical.
At first she felt no astonishment, for this was so different from anything she had ever seen befo
re that it had to be a trick of the eye, a false evaluation of size and speed and distance that in a moment would resolve itself into a sun-flash on an airplane or the lingering glare of a welding arc.
She looked away from it and abruptly realized that many other people saw it—saw something—too. People all around her had stopped moving and speaking and were craning upward. Around her was a globe of silent astonishment, and outside it she was aware of the life-noise of the city, the hard-breathing giant who never inhales.
She looked up again, and at last began to realize how large and how far away the saucer was. No: rather, how small and how very near it was. It was just the size of the largest circle she might make with her two hands, and it floated not quite eighteen inches over her head.
Fear came then. She drew back and raised a forearm, but the saucer simply hung there. She bent far sideways, twisted away, leaped forward, looked back and upward to see if she had escaped it. At first she couldn’t see it; then as she looked up and up, there it was, close and gleaming, quivering and crooning, right over her head.
She bit her tongue.
From the corner of her eye, she saw a man cross himself. He did that because he saw me standing here with a halo over my head, she thought. And that was the greatest single thing that had ever happened to her. No one had ever looked at her and made a respectful gesture before, not once, not ever. Through terror, through panic and wonderment, the comfort of that thought nestled into her, to wait to be taken out and looked at again in lonely times.
The terror was uppermost now, however. She backed away, staring upward, stepping a ludicrous cakewalk. She should have collided with people. There were plenty of people there, gasping and craning, but she reached none. She spun around and discovered to her horror that she was the center of a pointing, pressing crowd. Its mosaic of eyes all bulged and its inner circle braced its many legs to press back and away from her.
The saucer’s gentle note deepened. It tilted, dropped an inch or so. Someone screamed, and the crowd broke away from her in all directions, milled about, and settled again in a new dynamic balance, a much larger ring, as more and more people raced to thicken it against the efforts of the inner circle to escape.