A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  He bent to lift the bearded man to his feet. Osser stood half a head taller and his shoulders were as full and smooth as the bottoms of bowls. Golden hairs shifted and glinted on his forearms as he moved his fingers and the great cords tensed and valleyed. He lifted the man clear of the ground and set him easily on his feet and held him until he was sure of his balance.

  “You don’t understand me, do you?”

  The man shook his head weakly.

  “Don’t try. You’ll dig more if you don’t try.” He clapped the handle of the shovel into the man’s hand and picked up a mattock. “Dig,” he said, and the man began to dig.

  Osser smiled when the man turned to work, arched his nostrils and drew the warm clean air into his lungs. He liked the sunlight now, the morning smell of the turned soil, the work he had to do and the idea itself of working.

  Standing so, with his head raised, he saw a flash of bright yellow, the turn of a tanned face. Just a glimpse, and she was gone.

  For a moment he tensed, frowning. If she had seen him she would be off to clatter the story of it to the whole village. Then he smiled. Let her. Let them all know. They must, sooner or later. Let them try to stop him.

  He laughed, gripped his mattock, and the sod flew. So Jubilith saw fit to watch him, did she?

  He laughed again. Work now, Juby later. In time he would have everything.

  Everything.

  The village street wound and wandered and from time to time divided and rejoined itself, for each house was built on a man’s whim—near, far, high, small, separate, turned to or away. What did not harmonize contrasted well, and over all it was a pleasing place to walk.

  Before a shop a wood-cobbler sat, gouging out sabots; and he was next door to the old leatherworker who cunningly wove immortal belts of-square-knotted rawhide. Then a house, and another, and a cabin; a space of green where children played; and the skeleton of a new building where a man, his apron pockets full of hardwood pegs, worked knowledgeably with a heavy mallet.

  The cobbler, the leatherworker, the children and the builder all stopped to watch Jubilith because she was beautiful and because she ran. When she was by, they each saw the others watching, and each smiled and waved and laughed a little, though nothing was said.

  A puppy lolloped along after her, three legs deft, the fourth in the way. Had it been frightened, it would not have run, and had Jubilith spoken to it, it would have followed wherever she went. But she ignored it, even when it barked its small soprano bark, so it curved away from her, pretending it had been going somewhere else anyway, and then it sat and puffed and looked after her sadly.

  Past the smithy with its shadowed, glowing heart she ran; past the gristmill with its wonderful wheel, taking and yielding with its heavy cupped hands. A boy struck his hoop and it rolled across her path. Without breaking stride, she leaped high over it and ran on, and the glass-blower’s lips burst away from his pipe, for a man can smile or blow glass, but not both at the same time.

  When at last she reached Wrenn’s house, she was breathing deeply, but with no difficulty, in the way possible only to those who run beautifully. She stopped by the open door and waited politely, not looking in until Oyva came out and touched her shoulder.

  Jubilith faced her, keeping her eyes closed for a long moment, for Oyva was not only very old, she was Wrenn’s wife.

  “Is it Jubilith?” asked Oyva, smiling.

  “It is,” said the girl. She opened her eyes.

  Oyva, seeing their taut corners, said shrewdly, “A troubled Jubilith as well. I’ll not keep you. He’s just inside.”

  Juby found a swift flash of smile to give her and went into the house, leaving the old woman to wonder where, where in her long life she had seen such a brief flash of such great loveliness. A firebird’s wing? A green meteor? She put it away in her mind next to the memory of a burst of laughter—Wrenn’s, just after he had kissed her first—and sat down on a three-legged stool by the side of the house.

  A heavy fiber screen had been set up inside the doorway, to form a sort of meander, and at the third turn it was very dark. Juby paused to let the sunlight drain away from her vision. Somewhere in the dark before her there was music, the hay-clean smell of flower petals dried and freshly rubbed, and a voice humming. The voice and the music were open and free, but choked a listener’s throat like the sudden appearance of a field of daffodils.

  The voice and the music stopped short, and someone breathed quietly in the darkness.

  “Is … is it Wrenn?” she faltered.

  “It is,” said the voice.

  “Jubilith here.”

  “Move the screen,” said the voice. “I’d like the light, talking to you, Jubilith.”

  She felt behind her, touched the screen. It had many hinges and swung easily away to the doorside. Wrenn sat cross-legged in the corner behind a frame which held a glittering complex of stones.

  He brushed petal-dust from his hands. “Sit there, child, and tell me what it is you do not understand.”

  She sat down before him and lowered her eyes, and his widened, as if someone had taken away a great light.

  When she had nothing to say, he prompted her gently: “See if you can put it all into a single word, Jubilith.”

  She said immediately, “Osser.”

  “Ah,” said Wrenn.

  “I followed him this morning, out to the foothills beyond the Sky-tree Grove. He—”

  Wrenn waited.

  Jubilith put up her small hands, clenched, and talked in a rush. “Sussten, with the black brows, he was with Osser. They stopped and Osser shouted at him, and, when I came to where I could look down and see them, Osser took his fists and hammered Sussten, knocked him down. He laughed and picked him up. Sussten was sick; he was shaken and there was blood on his face. Osser told him to dig, and Sussten dug, Osser laughed again, he laughed … I think he saw me. I came here.”

  Slowly she put her fists down. Wrenn said nothing.

  Jubilith said, in a voice like a puzzled sigh, “I understand this: When a man hammers something, iron or clay or wood, it is to change what he hammers from what it is to what he wishes it to be.” She raised one hand, made a fist, and put it down again. She shook her head slightly and her heavy soft hair moved on her back. “To hammer a man is to change nothing. Sussten remains Sussten.”

  “It was good to tell me of this,” said Wrenn when he was sure she had finished.

  “Not good,” Jubilith disclaimed. “I want to understand.”

  Wrenn shook his head. Juby cocked her head on one side like a wondering bright bird. When she realized that his gesture was a refusal, a small paired crease came and went between her brows.

  “May I not understand this?”

  “You must not understand it,” Wrenn corrected. “Not yet, anyway. Perhaps after a time. Perhaps never.”

  “Ah,” she said. “I—I didn’t know.”

  “How could you know?” he asked kindly. “Don’t follow Osser again, Jubilith.”

  She parted her lips, then again gave the small headshake. She rose and went out.

  Oyva came to her. “Better now, Jubilith?”

  Juby tumed her head away; then, realizing that this was ill-mannered, met Oyva’s gaze. The girl’s eyes were full of tears. She closed them respectfully. Oyva touched her shoulder and let her go.

  Watching the slim, bright figure trudge away, bowed with thought, drag-footed, unseeing, Oyva grunted and stumped into the house.

  “Did she have to be hurt?” she demanded.

  “She did,” said Wrenn gently. “Osser,” he added.

  “Ah,” she said, in just the tone he had used when Jubilith first mentioned the name. “What has he done now?”

  Wrenn told her. Oyva sucked her lips in thoughtfully. “Why was the girl following him?”

  “I didn’t ask her. But don’t you know?”

  “I suppose I do,” said Oyva, and sighed. “That mustn’t happen, Wrenn.”

  “It won’t. I
told her not to follow him again.”

  She looked at him fondly. “I suppose even you can act like a fool once in a while.”

  He was startled. “Fool?”

  “She loves him. You won’t keep her from him by a word of advice.”

  “You judge her by yourself,” he said, just as fondly. “She’s only a child; in a day, a week, she’ll wrap someone else up in her dreams.

  “Suppose she doesn’t?”

  “Don’t even think about it.” A shudder touched his voice.

  “I shall, though,” said Oyva with determination. “And you’d do well to think about it, too.” When his eyes grew troubled, she touched his cheek gently, “Now play some more for me.”

  He sat down before the instrument, his hands poised. Then into the tiny bins his fingers went, rubbing this dried-petal powder and that, and the stones glowed, changing the flower-scents into music and shifting colors.

  He began to sing softly to the music.

  They dug deep, day by day, and they built. Osser did the work of three men, and sometimes six or eight others worked with him, and sometimes one or two. Once he had twelve. But never did he work alone.

  When the stone was three tiers above ground level, Osser climbed the nearest rise and stood looking down at it proudly, at the thickness and strength of the growing walls, at the toiling workers who lifted and strained to make them grow.

  “Is it Osser?”

  The voice was as faint and shy as a fern uncurling, as promising as spring itself.

  He turned.

  “Jubilith,” she told him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I come here every day,” she said. She indicated the copse which crowned the hill. “I hide here and watch you.”

  “What do you want?”

  She laced her fingers. “I would like to dig there and lift stones.”

  “No,” he said, and turned to study the work again.

  “Why not?”

  “Never ask me why. ‘Because I say so’—that’s all the answer you’ll get from me—you or anyone.”

  She came to stand beside him. “You build fast.”

  He nodded. “Faster than any village house was ever built.” He could sense the ‘why’ rising within her, and could feel it being checked.

  “I want to build it, too,” she pleaded.

  “No,” he said. His eyes widened as he watched the work. Suddenly he was gone, leaping down the slope in great springy strides. He turned the corner of the new wall and stood, saying nothing. The man who had been idling turned quickly and lifted a stone. Osser smiled a quick, taut smile and went to work beside him. Jubilith stood on the slope, watching, wondering.

  She came almost every day as the tower grew. Osser never spoke to her. She watched the sunlight on him, the lithe strength, the rippling gold. He stood like a great tree, squatted like a rock, moved like a thundercloud. His voice was a whip, a bugle, the roar of a bull.

  She saw him less and less in the village. Once it was a fearsome thing to see. Early in the morning he appeared suddenly, overtook a man, lifted him and threw him flat on the ground.

  “I told you to be out there yesterday,” he growled, and strode away.

  Friends came and picked the man up, held him softly while he coughed, took him away to be healed.

  No one went to Wrenn about it; the word had gone around that Osser and his affairs were not to be understood by anyone. Wrenn’s function was to explain those few things which could not be understood. But certain of these few were not to be understood at all. So Osser was left alone to do as he wished—which was a liberty, after all, that was enjoyed by everyone else.

  There came a twilight when Jubilith waited past her usual time. She waited until by ones and twos the workers left the tower, until Osser himself had climbed the hill, until he had paused to look back and be proud and think of tomorrow’s work, until he, too, had turned his face to the town. Then she slipped down to the tower and around it, and carefully climbed the scaffolding on the far side. She looked about her.

  The tower was now four stories high and seemed to be shaping toward a roof. Circular in cross-section, the tower had two rooms on each floor, an east-west wall between them on the ground floor, a north-south wall on the next, and so on up.

  There was a central well into which was built a spiral staircase—a double spiral, as if one helix had been screwed into the other. This made possible two exits to stairs on each floor at the same level, though they were walled off one from the other. Each of the two rooms on every floor had one connecting doorway. Each room had three windows in it, wide on the inside, tapering through the thick stone wall to form the barest slit outside.

  A portion of the castellated roof was already built. It overhung the entrance, and had slots in the overhang through which the whole entrance face of the tower could be covered by one man lying unseen on the roof, looking straight down.

  Stones lay in a trough ready for placing, and there was some leftover mortar in the box. Jubilith picked up a trowel and worked it experimentally in the stuff, then lifted some out and tipped it down on the unfinished top of the wall, just as she had seen Osser do so many times. She put down the trowel and chose a stone. It was heavy—much heavier than she had expected—but she made it move, made it lift, made it seat itself to suit her on the fresh mortar. She ticked off the excess from the join and stepped back to admire it in the fading light.

  Two great clamps, hard as teeth, strong as a hurricane, caught her right thigh and her left armpit. She was swung into the air and held helpless over the unfinished parapet.

  She was utterly silent, shocked past the ability even to gasp.

  “I told you you were not to work here,” said Osser between his teeth. So tall he was, so long were his arms as he held her high over his head, that it seemed almost as far to the parapet as it was to the ground below.

  He leaned close to the edge and shook her. “I’ll throw you off. This tower is mine to build, you hear?”

  If she had been able to breathe, she might have screamed or pleaded with him. If she had screamed or pleaded, he might have dropped her. But her silence apparently surprised him. He grunted and set her roughly on her feet. She caught at his shoulder to keep her balance, then quickly transferred her hold to the edge of the parapet. She dropped her head between her upper arms. Her long soft hair fell forward over her face, and she moaned.

  “I told you,” he said, really seeing her at last. His voice shook. He stepped toward her and put out his hand. She screamed. “Be quiet!” he roared. A moan shut off in mid-breath. “Ah, I told you, Juby. You shouldn’t have tried to build here.”

  He ran his great hands over the edge of the stonework, found the one she had laid, the one that had cost her such effort to lift. With one hand, he plucked it up and threw it far out into the shadows below.

  “I wanted to help you with it,” she whispered.

  “Don’t you understand?” he cried. “No one builds here who wants to help!”

  She simply shook her head.

  She tried to breathe deeply and a long shudder possessed her.

  When it passed, she turned weakly and stood, her back partly arched over the edge of the parapet, her hands behind her to cushion the stone. She shook the hair out of her face; it fell away on either side like a dawnlit bow-wave. She looked up at him with an expression of such piteous confusion that his dwindling rage vanished altogether.

  He dropped his eyes and shuffled one foot like a guilty child. “Juby, leave me alone.”

  Something almost like a smile touched her lips. She brushed her bruised arm, then walked past him to the place where the scaffolding projected above the parapet.

  “Not that way,” he called. “Come here.”

  He took her hand and led her to the spiral staircase at the center of the tower. It was almost totally dark inside. It seemed like an age to her as they descended; she was alone in a black universe consisting of a rhythmic drop and turn, a
nd a warm hard hand in hers, holding and leading her.

  When they emerged, he stopped in the strange twilight, a darkness for all the world but a dazzle to them, so soaked with blackness were their eyes. She tugged gently, but he would not release her hand. She moved close to see his face. His eyes were wide and turned unseeing to the far slopes; he was frowning, yet his mouth was not fierce, but irresolute. Whatever his inward struggle was, it left his face gradually and transferred itself to his hand. Its pressure on hers became firm, hard, intense, painful.

  “Osser!”

  He dropped the hand and stepped back, shamed. “Juby, I will take you to … Juby, do you want to understand?” He waved at the tower.

  She said, “Oh, yes!”

  He looked at her closely, and the angry, troubled diffidence came and went. “Half a day there, half a day back again,” he said.

  She recognized that this was as near as this feral, unhappy man could come to asking a permission. “I’d like to understand,” she said.

  “If you don’t, I’m going to kill you,” he blurted. He turned to the west and strode off, not looking back.

  Jubilith watched him go, and suddenly there was a sparkle in her wide eyes. She slipped out of her sandals, caught them up in her hand, and ran lightly and silently after him. He planted his feet strongly, like the sure, powerful teeth of the mill-wheel gears, and he would not look back. She sensed how immensely important it was to him not to look back. She knew that right-handed men look back over their left shoulders, so she drifted along close to him, a little behind him, a little to his right. How long, how long, until he looked to see if she was coming?

  Up and up the slope, to its crest, over … down … ah! Just here, just at the last second where he could turn and look without stopping and still catch a glimpse of the tower’s base, where they had stood. So he turned, and she passed around him like a windblown feather, unseen.

  And he stopped, looking back, craning. His shoulders slumped, and slowly he turned to his path again—and there was Jubilith before him.

  She laughed.

  His jaw dropped, and then his lips came together in a thin, angry seal. For a moment he stared at her; and suddenly, quite against his will, there burst from him a single harsh bark of laughter. She put out her hand and he came to her, took it, and they went their way together.