A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  They came to a village when it was very late and very dark, and Osser circled it. They came to another, and Jubilith thought he would do the same, for he turned south; but when they came abreast of it, he struck north again.

  “We’ll be seen,” he explained gruffly, “but we’ll be seen coming from the south and leaving northward.”

  She would not ask where he was taking her, or why he was making these elaborate arrangements, but already she had an idea. What lay to the west was—not forbidden, exactly, but, say discouraged. It was felt that there was nothing in that country that could be of value. Anyone traveling that way would surely be remembered.

  So through the village they went, and they dined quickly at an inn, and went northward, and once in the darkness, veered west again. In a wood so dark that she had taken his hand again, he stopped and built a fire. He threw down springy boughs and a thick heap of ferns, and this was her bed. He slept sitting up, his back to a tree trunk, with Jubilith between him and the fire.

  Jubilith awoke twice during the long night, once to see him with his eyes closed, but feeling that he was not asleep; and once to see him with his eyes open and the dying flames flickering in the pupils, and she thought then that he was asleep, or at least not with her, but lost in the pictures the flames painted.

  In the morning they moved on, gathering berries for breakfast, washing in a humorous brook. And during this whole journey, nothing passed between them but the small necessary phrases: “You go first here.” “Look out—it drops.” “Tired yet?”

  For there was that about Jubilith which made explanations unnecessary. Though she did not know where they were going, or why, she understood what must be done to get them there within the framework of his desire: to go immediately, as quickly as possible, undetected by anyone else.

  She did only what she could to help and did not plague him with questions which would certainly be answered in good time. So: “Here are berries.” “Look, a red bird!” “Can we get through there, or shall we go around?” And nothing more.

  They did well, the weather was fine, and by mid-morning they had reached the tumbled country of the Crooked Hills. Jubilith had seen them from afar—great broken mounds and masses against the western sky—but no one ever went there, and she knew nothing about them.

  They were in open land now, and Jubilith regretted leaving the color and aliveness of the forest. The grasses here were strange, like yet unlike those near her village. They were taller, sickly, and some had odd ugly flowers. There were bald places, scored with ancient rain-gullies, as if some mighty hand had dashed acid against the soil. There were few insects and no animals that she could see, and no birds sang. It was a place of great sadness rather than terror; there was little to fear, but much to grieve for.

  By noon, they faced a huge curved ridge, covered with broken stones. It looked as if the land itself had reared up and pressed back from a hidden something on the other side—something which it would not touch. Osser quickened their pace as they began to climb, although the going was hard. Jubilith realized that they were near the end of their journey, and uncomplainingly struggled along at the cruel pace he set.

  At the top, they paused, giving their first attention to their wind, and gradually to the scene before them.

  The ridge on which they stood was nearly circular, and perhaps a mile and a half in diameter. In its center was a small round lake with unnaturally bare shores. Mounds of rubble sloped down toward it on all sides, and farther back was broken stone.

  But it was the next zone which caught and held the eye. The weed-grown wreckage there was beyond description. Great twisted webs and ribs of gleaming metal wove in and out of the slumped heaps of soil and masonry. Nearby, a half-acre of laminated stone stood on the edge like a dinner plate in a clay bank. What could have been a building taller than any Jubilith had ever heard about lay on its side, smashed and bulging.

  Gradually she began to realize the peculiarity of this place—All the larger wreckage lay in lines directly to and from the lake in a monstrous radiation of ruin.

  “What is this place?” she asked at last.

  “Don’t know,” he grunted, and went over the edge to slip down the steep slope. When she caught up with him near the bottom, he said, “There’s miles of this, west and north of here, much bigger. But this is the one we came to see. Come.”

  He looked to right and left as if to get his bearings, then plunged into the tough and scrubby underbrush that vainly tried to cover those tortured metal bones. She followed as closely as she could, beating at the branches which he carelessly let whip back.

  Just in front of her, he turned the corner of a sharp block of stone, and when she turned it no more than a second later, he was gone.

  She stopped, turned, turned again. Dust, weeds, lonely and sorrowful ruins. No Osser. She shrank back against the stone, her eyes wide.

  The bushes nearby trembled, then lashed. Osser’s head emerged. “What’s the matter? Come on!” he said gruffly.

  She checked an impulse to cry out and run to him, and came silently forward. Osser held the bushes briefly, and beside him she saw a black hole with broken steps leading downward.

  She hesitated, but he moved his head impatiently, and she passed him and led the way downward. When he followed, his wide flat body blocked out the light. The darkness was so heavy, her eyes ached.

  He prodded her in the small of the back. “Go on, go on!”

  The foot of the steps came sooner than she expected and her knees buckled as she took the downward step that was not there. She tripped, almost fell, then somehow got to the side wall and braced herself there, trembling.

  “Wait,” he said, and the irrepressible smile quirked the corners of her mouth. As if she would go anywhere!

  She heard him fumbling about somewhere, and then there was a sudden aching blaze of light that made her cry out and clap her hands over her face.

  “Look,” he said. “I want you to look at this. Hold it.”

  Into her hands he pressed a cylinder about half the length of her forearm. At one end was a lens from which the blue-white light was streaming.

  “See this little thing here,” he said, and touched a stud at the side of the cylinder. The light disappeared, came on again.

  She laughed delightedly, took the cylinder and played its light around, switching it on and off. “It’s wonderful!” she cried. “Oh, wonderful!”

  “You take this one,” he said, pleased. He handed her another torch and took the first from her. “It isn’t as good, but it will help. I’ll go first.”

  She took the second torch and tried it. It worked the same way, but the light was orange and feeble. Osser strode ahead down a slanting passageway. At first there was a great deal of rubble underfoot, but soon the way was clear as they went farther and deeper. Osser walked with confidence, and she knew he had been here before, probably many times.

  “Here,” he said, stopping to wait for her. His voice echoed strangely, vibrant with controlled excitement.

  He turned his torch ahead, swept it back and forth.

  They were at the entrance to a room. It was three times the height of a man, and as big as their village green. She stared around, awed.

  “Come,” Osser said again, and went to the far corner.

  A massive, box-like object stood there. One panel, about eye-level, was of a milky smooth substance, the rest of black metal. Projecting from the floor in front of it was a lever. Osser grasped it confidently and pulled. It yielded sluggishly, and returned to its original position. Osser tugged again. There was a low growling sound from the box. Osser pulled, released, pulled, released, each time a little faster. The sound rose in pitch, higher and higher.

  “Turn off your light,” he said.

  She did so and blackness snapped in around them. As the dazzle faded from her eyes, she detected a flicker of silver light before her, and realized that it came from the milky pane in the box. As Osser pulled at the lever and th
e whine rose and rose in pitch, the square got bright enough for her to see her hands when she looked down at them.

  And then—the pictures.

  Jubilith had never seen pictures like these. They moved, for one thing; for another, they had no color. Everything in them was black and white and shades of gray. Yet everything they showed seemed very real.

  Not at first, for there was flickering and stopped motion, and then slow motion as Osser’s lever moved faster and faster. But at last the picture steadied, and Osser kept the lever going at the same speed, flicking it with apparent ease about twice a second, while the whine inside the box settled to a steady, soft moan.

  The picture showed a ball spinning against a black, light-flecked curtain. It rushed close until it filled the screen, and still closer, and Jubilith suddenly had the feeling that she was falling at tremendous velocity from an unthinkable height. Down and down the scene went, until at last the surface began to take on the qualities of a bird’s-eye view. She saw a river and lakes, and a great range of hills—

  And, at last, the city.

  It was a city beyond fantasy, greater and more elaborate than imagination could cope with. Its towers stretched skyward to pierce the clouds themselves—some actually did. It had wide ramps on which traffic crawled, great bridges across the river, parks over which the buildings hung like mighty cliffs. Closer still the silver eye came to the scene, and she realized that the traffic was not crawling, but moving faster than a bird, faster than the wind. The vehicles were low and sleek and efficient.

  And on the walks were people, and the scene wheeled and slowed and showed them. They were elaborately clothed and well-fed; they were hurried and orderly at the same time. There was a square in which perhaps a thousand of them, all dressed alike, were drawn up in lines as straight as stretched string. Even as she watched, they all began to move together, a thousand left legs coming forward, a thousand right arms swinging back.

  Higher, then, and more of the city—more and more of it, until the sense of wonder filled her lungs and she hardly breathed; and still more of it, miles of it. And at last a great open space with what looked like sections of road crossing on it—but such unthinkable roads! Each was as wide as her whole village and miles long. And on these roads, great birdlike machines tilted down and touched and rolled, and swung and ran and took the air, dozens of them every minute. The scene swept close again, and it was as if she were in such a machine herself; but it did not land. It raced past the huge busy crossroads and out to a coastline.

  And there were ships, ships as long as the tallest buildings were high, and clusters, dozens, hundreds of other vessels working and smoking and milling about in the gray water. Huge machines crouched over ships and lifted out cargoes; small, agile machines scurried about the docks and warehouses.

  Then at last the scene dwindled as the magic eye rose higher and higher, faster and faster. Details disappeared, and clouds raced past and downward, and at last the scene was a disc and then a ball floating in starlit space.

  Osser let the lever go and it snapped back to its original position.

  The moan descended quickly in pitch, and the motion on the screen slowed, flickered, faded and went out.

  Jubilith let the darkness come. Her mind spun and shook with the impact of what she had seen. Slowly she recovered herself. She became conscious of Osser’s hard breathing. She turned on her dim orange torch and looked at him. He was watching her.

  “What was it?” she breathed.

  “What I came to show you.”

  She thought hard. She thought about his tower, about his refusal to let her work on it, about his cruelty to those who had. She looked at him, at the blank screen. And this was to supply the reason.

  She shook her head.

  He lowered himself slowly and squatted like an animal, hunched up tight, his knees in his armpits. This lifted and crooked his heavy arms. He rested their knuckles on the floor. He glowered at her and said nothing. He was waiting.

  On the way here, he had said, “I’ll kill you if you don’t understand.” But he wouldn’t really, would he? Would he?

  If he had towered over her, ranted and shouted, she would not have been afraid. But squatting there, waiting, silent, with his great arms bowed out like that, he was like some patient, preying beast.

  She turned off the light to blot out the sight of him, and immediately became speechless with terror at the idea of his sitting there in the dark so close, waiting. She might run; she was so swift … but no; crouched like that, he could spring and catch her before she could tense a muscle.

  Again she looked at the dead screen. “Will you … tell me something?” she quavered.

  “I might.”

  “Tell me, then: When you first saw that picture, did you understand? The very first time?”

  His expression did not change. But slowly he relaxed. He rocked sidewise, sat down, extended his legs. He was man again, not monster. She shuddered, then controlled it.

  He said, “It took me a long time and many visits. I should not have asked you to understand at once.”

  She again accepted the timid half-step toward an apology, and was grateful.

  He said, “Those were men and women just like us. Did you see that? Just like us.”

  “Their clothes—”

  “Just like us,” he insisted. “Of course they dressed differently, lived differently! In a world like that, why not? Ah, how they built, how they built!”

  “Yes,” she whispered. Those towers, the shining, swift vehicles, the thousand who moved like one … “Who were they?” she asked him.

  “Don’t you know? Think—think!”

  “Osser, I want to understand. I truly want to!”

  She hunted frantically for the right thing to say, the right way to catch at this elusive thing which was so frighteningly important to him. All her life she had had the answers to the questions she wanted to understand. All she had ever had to do was to close her eyes and think of the problem, and the answers soon came.

  But not this problem.

  “Osser,” she pleaded, “where is it, the city, the great complicated city?”

  “Say, ‘Where was it?’ ” he growled.

  She caught his thought and gasped. “This? These ruins, Osser?”

  “Ah,” he said approvingly. “It comes slowly, doesn’t it? No, Juby. Not here. What was here was an outpost, a village, compared with the big city. North and west, I told you, didn’t I? Miles of it. So big that … so big—” He extended his arms, dropped them helplessly. Suddenly he leaned close to her, began to talk fast, feverishly. “Juby, that city—that world—was built by people. Why did they build and why do we not? What is the difference between those people and ours?”

  “They must have had …”

  “They had nothing we don’t have. They’re the same kind of people; they used something we haven’t been using. Juby, I’ve got that something. I can build. I can make others build.”

  A mental picture of the tower glimmered before her. “You built it with hate,” she said wonderingly. “Is that what they had—cruelty, brutality, hatred?”

  “Yes!”

  “I don’t believe it! I don’t believe anyone could live with that much hate!”

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps they didn’t. But they built with it. They built because some men could flog others into building for them, building higher and faster than all the good neighbors would ever do helping one another.”

  “They’d hate the man who made them build like that.”

  Osser’s hands crackled as he pressed them together. He laughed, and the echoes took everything that was unpleasant about that laughter and filled the far reaches of the dark room with it.

  “They’d hate him,” he agreed. “But he’s strong, you see. He was strong in the first place, to make them build, and he’s stronger afterward with what they built for him. Do you know the only way they can express their hatred, once they find he’s too strong for them?�
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  Jubilith shook her head.

  “They’d build,” he chuckled. “They’d build higher and faster than he did. They would find the strongest man among them and ask him to flog them into it. That’s the way a great city goes up. A strong man builds, and strong men follow, and soon the man who’s strongest of all makes all the other strong ones do his work. Do you see?”

  “And the … the others, the weak?”

  “What of them?” he asked scornfully. “There are more of them than strong ones—so there are more hands to do the strong man’s work. And why shouldn’t they? Don’t they get the city to live in when it’s built? Don’t they ride about in swift shining carriers and fly through the air in the bird machines?”

  “Would they be—happy?” she asked.

  He looked at her in genuine puzzlement. “Happy?” He smashed a heavy fist into his palm. “They’d have a city!” Again the words tumbled from him. “How do you live, you and the rest of the village? What do you do when you want a—well, a garden, food from the ground?”

  “I dig up the soil,” she said. “I plant and water and weed.”

  “Suppose you want a plow?”

  “I make one. Or I do work for someone who has one.”

  “Uh,” he grunted. “And there you are, hundreds of you in the village, each one planting a little, smithing a little, thatching and cutting and building a little. Everyone does everything except for how many—four, five?—the leatherworker, old Griak who makes wooden pegs for house beams, one or two others.”

  “They like to do just one work. But anyone can do any of the work. Those few, we take care of. Someone has to keep the skills alive.”

  He snorted. “Put a strong man in the village and give him strong men to do what he wants. Get ten villagers at once and make them all plant at once. You’ll have food then for fifty, not ten!”

  “But it would go to waste!”

  “It would not, because it would all belong to the head man. He would give it away as he saw fit—a lot to those who obeyed him, nothing to those who didn’t. What was left over he could keep for himself, and barter it out to keep building. Soon he would have the biggest house and the best animals and the finest women, and the more he got, the stronger he would be. And a city would grow—a city! And the strong man would give everyone better things if they worked hard, and protect them.”