A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Protect them? Against what?”

  “Against the other strong ones. There would be others.”

  “And you—”

  “I shall be the strongest of all,” he said proudly. He waved at the box. “We were a great people once. We’re ants now—less than ants, for at least the ants work together for a common purpose. I’ll make us great again.” His head sank onto his hand and he looked somberly into the shadows. “Something happened to this world. Something smashed the cities and the people and drove them down to what they are today. Something was broken within them, and they no longer dared to be great. Well, they will be. I have the extra something that was smashed out of them.”

  “What smashed them, Osser?”

  “Who can know? I don’t. I don’t care, either.” He tapped her with a long forefinger to emphasize. “All I care about is this: They were smashed because they were not strong enough. I shall be so strong I can’t be smashed.”

  She said, “A stomach can hold only so much. A man asleep takes just so much space. So much and no more clothing makes one comfortable. Why do you want more than these things, Osser?”

  She knew he was annoyed, and knew, too, that he was considering the question as honestly as he could.

  “It’s because I … I want to be strong,” he said in a strained voice.

  “You are strong.”

  “Who knows that?” he raged, and the echoes giggled and whispered.

  “I do. Wrenn. Sussten. The whole village.”

  “The whole world will know. They will all do things for me.”

  She thought, but everyone does everything for himself, all over the world. Except, she added, those who aren’t able …

  With that in mind, she looked at him, his oaken shoulders, his powerful, bitter mouth. She touched the bruises his hands had left and the beginnings of the understanding she had been groping for left her completely.

  She said dully, “Your tower … you’d better get back there.”

  “Work goes on,” he said, smiling tightly, “whether I’m there or not, as long as they don’t know my plans. They are afraid. But—yes, we can go now.”

  Rising, he flicked the stud of his torch. It flared blue-white, faded to the weak orange of Jubilith’s, then died.

  “The light …”

  “It’s all right,” said Jubilith. “I have mine.”

  “When they get like that, so dim, you can’t tell when they’ll go out. Come—hurry! This place is full of corridors; without light, we could be lost here for days.”

  She glanced around at the crowding shadows. “Make it work again,” she suggested.

  He looked at the dead torch in his hand. “You,” he said flatly. He tossed it. She caught it in her free hand, put her torch on the floor, and held the broken one down so she could see it in the waning orange glow. She turned it over twice, her sensitive hands feeling with every part rather than with fingertips alone. She held it still and closed her eyes; and then it came to her, and she grasped one end with her right hand and the other with her left and twisted.

  There was a faint click and the outer shell of the torch separated. She drew off the butt end of it; it was just a hollow shell. The entire mechanism was attached to the lens end and was now exposed.

  She turned it over carefully, keeping her fingers away from the workings. Again she closed her eyes and thought, and at last she bent close and peered. She nodded, fumbled in her hair, and detached a copper clasp. She bent and broke off a narrow strip of it and inserted it carefully into the light mechanism. Very carefully, she pried apart two small strands of wire, dipped a little deeper, hooked onto a tiny white sphere, and drew it out.

  “Poor thing,” she murmured under her breath.

  “Poor what?”

  “Spider’s egg,” she said ruefully. “They fight so to save them; and this one will never hatch out now. It’s been burned.”

  She picked up the butt-end housing, slipped the two parts together, and twisted them until they clicked. She handed the torch to Osser.

  “You’ve wasted time,” he complained, surly.

  “No, I haven’t,” she said. “We’ll have light now.”

  He touched the stud on the torch. The brilliant, comforting white light poured from it.

  “Yes,” he admitted quietly.

  Watching his face as he handled the torch, she knew that if she could read what was in his mind in that second, she would have the answer to everything about him. She could not, however, and he said nothing, but led the way across the room to the dark corridor.

  He was silent all the way back to the broken steps.

  They stood halfway up, letting their eyes adjust to the daylight which poured down on them, and he said, “You didn’t even try the torch to see if it would work, after you took out that egg.”

  “I knew it would work.” She looked at him, amazed. “You’re angry.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  He took her torch and his and put them away in a niche in the ruined stairwell, and they climbed up into the noon light. It was all but intolerable, as the two suns were all but in syzygy, the blue-white midget shining through the great pale gaseous mass of the giant, so that together they cast only a single shadow.

  “It will be hot this afternoon,” she said, but he was silent, steeped in some bitterness of his own, so she followed him quietly without attempting conversation.

  Old Oyva stirred sleepily in her basking chair, and suddenly sat upright.

  Jubilith approached her, pale and straight. “Is it Oyva?”

  “It is, Jubilith,” said the old woman. “I knew you would be back, my dear. I’m sore in my heart with you.”

  “Is he here?”

  “He is. He has been on a journey. You’ll find him tired.”

  “He should have been here, with all that has happened,” said Jubilith.

  “He should have done exactly as he has done,” Oyva stated bluntly.

  Jubilith recognized the enormity of her rudeness, and the taste of it was bad in her mouth. One did not criticize Wrenn’s comings and goings.

  She faced Oyva and closed her eyes humbly.

  Oyva touched her. “It’s all right, child. You are distressed. Wrenn!” she called. “She is here!”

  “Come, Jubilith,” Wrenn’s voice called from the house.

  “He knows? No one knew I was coming here!”

  “He knows,” said Oyva. “Go to him, child.”

  Jubilith entered the house. Wrenn sat in his corner. The musical instrument was nowhere in sight. Aside from his cushions, there was nothing in the room.

  Wrenn gave her his wise, sweet smile. “Jubilith,” he said. “Come close.” He looked drawn and pale, but quite untroubled. He put a cushion by him and she crossed slowly and sank down on it.

  He was quiet, and when she was sure it was because he waited for her to speak, she said, “Some things may not be understood.”

  “True,” he agreed.

  She kneaded her hands. “Is there never a change?”

  “Always,” he said, “when it’s time.”

  “Osser—”

  “Everyone will understand Osser very soon now.”

  She screwed up her courage. “Soon is not soon enough. I must know him now.”

  “Before anyone else?” he inquired mildly.

  “Let everyone know now,” she suggested.

  He shook his head and there was no appeal in it.

  “Then let me. I shall be a part of you and speak of it only to you.”

  “Why must you understand?”

  She shuddered. It was not cold, or fear, but simply the surgings of a great emotion.

  “I love him,” she said. “And to love is to guard and protect. He needs me.”

  “Go to him then.” But she sat where she was, her long eyes cast down, weeping. Wrenn said, “There is more, then?”

  “I love …” She threw out an arm in a gesture which enfolded Wrenn, the house, the village. “I lov
e the people, too, the gardens, the little houses; the way we go and come, and sing, and make music, and make our own tools and clothes. To love is to guard and protect … and I love these things, and I love Osser. I can destroy Osser, because he would not expect it of me; and, if I did, I would protect all of you. But if I protect him, he will destroy you. There is no answer to such a problem, Wrenn; it is a road,” she cried, “with a precipice at each end, and no standing still!”

  “And understanding him would be an answer?”

  “There’s no other!” She turned her face up to him, imploring. “Osser is strong, Wrenn, with a—new thing about him, a thing none of the rest of us have. He has told me of it. It is a thing that can change us, make us part of him. He will build cities with our hands, on our broken bodies if we resist him. He wants us to be a great people again—he says we were, once, and have lost it all.”

  “And do you regard that as greatness, Jubilith—the towers, the bird-machines?”

  “How did you know of them?… Greatness? I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, and wept. “I love him, and he wants to build a city with a wanting greater than anything I have ever known or heard of before. Could he do it, Wrenn? Could he?”

  “He might,” said Wrenn calmly.

  “He is in the village now. He has about him the ones who built his tower for him. They cringe around him, hating to be near and afraid to leave. He sent them one by one to tell all the people to come out to the foothills tomorrow, to begin work on his city. He wants enough building done in one hundred days to shelter everyone, because then, he says, he is going to burn this village to the ground. Why, Wrenn—why?”

  “Perhaps,” said Wrenn, “so that we may all face his strength and yield to it. A man who could move a whole village in a hundred days just to show his strength would be a strong man indeed.”

  “What shall we do?”

  “I think we shall go out to the foothills in the morning and begin to build.”

  She rose and went to the door.

  “I know what to do now,” she whispered. “I won’t try to understand any more. I shall just go and help him.”

  “Yes, go,” said Wrenn. “He will need you.”

  Jubilith stood with Osser on the parapet, and with him stared into the dappled dawn. The whole sky flamed with the loom of the red sun’s light, but the white one preceded it up the sky, laying sharp shadows in the soft blunt ones. Birds called and chattered in the Sky-tree Grove, and deep in the thickets the seven-foot bats grunted as they settled in to sleep.

  “Suppose they don’t come?” she asked.

  “They’ll come,” he said grimly. “Jubilith, why are you here?”

  She said, “I don’t know what you are doing, Osser. I don’t know whether it’s right or whether you will keep on succeeding. I do know there will be pain and difficulty and I—I came to keep you safe, if I could … I love you.”

  He looked down at her, as thick and dark over her as his tower was over the foothills. One side of his mouth twitched.

  “Little butterfly,” he said softly, “do you think you can guard me?”

  Everything beautiful about her poured out to him through her beautiful face, and for a moment his world had three suns instead of two. He put his arms around her. Then his great voice exploded with two syllables of a mighty laugh. He lifted her and swung her behind him, and leaped to the parapet.

  Deeply shaken, she came to follow his gaze.

  The red sun’s foggy limb was above the townward horizon, and silhouetted against it came the van of a procession. On they came and on, the young men of the village, the fathers. Women were with them, too, and everything on wheels that the village possessed—flatbed wagons, two-wheeled rickshaw carts, children’s and vendors’ and pleasure vehicles. A snorting team of four tiger-oxen clawed along before a heavily laden stone-boat, and men shared packs that swung in the center of long poles.

  Osser curled his lip. “You see them,” he said, as if to himself, “doing the only thing they can think of. Push them, they yield. The clods!” he spat. “Well, one day, one will push back. And when he does, I’ll break him, and after that I’ll use him. Meantime—I have a thousand hands and a single mind. We’ll see building now,” he crooned. “When they’ve built, they’ll know what they don’t know now—that they’re men.”

  “They’ve all come,” breathed Jubilith. “All of them. Osser—”

  “Be quiet,” he said, leaning into the wind to watch, gloating. With the feel of his hard hands still on her back, she discovered with a crushing impact that there was no room in his heart for her when he thought of his building. And she knew that there never would be, except perhaps for a stolen moment, a touch in passing. With the pain of that realization came the certainty that she would stay with him always, even for so little.

  The procession dipped out of sight, then slowly rose over and down the near hill and approached the tower. It spread and thickened at the foot of the slope, as men cast about, testing the ground with their picks, eying the land for its color and vegetation and drainage … or was that what they were doing?

  Osser leaned his elbows on the parapet and shook his head pityingly at their inefficiency. Look at the way they went about laying out houses! And their own houses. Well, he’d let them mill about until they were completely confused, and then he’d go down and make them do it his way. Confused men are soft men; men working against their inner selves are easy to divert from outside.

  Beside him, Jubilith gasped.

  “What is it?”

  She pointed. “There—sending the men to this side, that side. See, by the stone-boat? It’s Wrenn!”

  “Nonsense!” said Osser. “He’d never leave his house. Not to walk around among people who are sweating. He deals only with people who tell him he’s right before he speaks.”

  “It’s Wrenn, it is, it is!” cried Jubilith. She clutched his arm. “Osser, I’m afraid!”

  “Afraid? Afraid of what?… By the dying Red One, it is Wrenn, telling men what to do as if this was his city.” He laughed. “There are few enough here who are strong, Juby, but he’s the strongest there is. And look at him scurry around for me!”

  “I’m afraid,” Jubilith whimpered.

  “They jump when he tells them,” said Osser reflectively, shading his eyes. “Perhaps I was wrong to let them tire themselves out before I help them do things right. With a man like him to push them … Hm. I think we’ll get it done right the first time.”

  He pushed himself away from the parapet and swung to the stairway.

  “Osser, don’t, please don’t!” she begged.

  He stopped just long enough to give her a glance like a stone thrown. “You’ll never change my mind, Juby, and you’ll be hurt if you try too often.” He dropped into the opening, went down three steps, five steps …

  He grunted, stopped.

  Jubilith came slowly over to the stairwell. Osser stood on the sixth step, on tiptoe. Impossibly on tiptoe: the points of his sandals barely touched the step at all.

  He set his jaw and placed his massive hands one on each side of the curved wall. He pressed them out and up, forcing himself downward. His sandals touched more firmly; his toes bent, his heels made contact. His face became deep red, and the cords at the sides of his neck ridged like a weathered fallow-field.

  A strained crackle came from his shoulders, and then the pent breath burst from him. His hands slipped, and he came up again just the height of the single stair-riser, to bob ludicrously like a boat at anchor, his pointed toe touching and lifting from the sixth step.

  He gave an inarticulate roar, bent double, and plunged his hands downward as if to dive head-first down the stairs. His wrists turned under and he yelped with the pain. More cautiously he felt around and down, from wall to wall. It was as if the air in the stairway had solidified, become at once viscous and resilient. Whatever was there was invisible and completely impassable.

  He backed slowly up the steps. On his face th
ere was fury and frustration, hurt and a shaking reaction.

  Jubilith wrung her hands. “Please, please, Osser, be care—”

  The sound of her voice gave him something to strike out at, and he spun about, raising his great bludgeon of a fist. Jubilith stood frozen, too shocked to dodge the blow.

  “Osser!”

  Osser stopped, tensed high, fist up, like some terrifying monument to vengeance. The voice had been Wrenn’s—Wrenn speaking quietly, even conversationally, but magnified beyond belief. The echoes of it rolled off and were lost in the hills.

  “Come watch men building, Osser!”

  Dazed, Osser lowered his arm and went to the parapet.

  Far below, near the base of the hill, Wrenn stood, looking up at the tower. When Osser appeared, Wrenn turned his back and signaled the men by the stone-boat. They twitched away the tarpaulin that covered its load.

  Osser’s hands gripped the stone as if they would powder it. His eyes slowly widened and his jaw slowly dropped.

  At first it seemed like a mound of silver on the rude platform of the ox-drawn stone-boat. Gradually he perceived that it was a machine, a machine so finished, so clean-lined and so businesslike that the pictures he had shown Jubilith were clumsy toys in comparison.

  It was Sussten, a man Osser had crushed to the ground with two heavy blows, who sprang lightly up on the machine and settled into it. It backed off the platform, and Osser could hear the faintest of whines from it. The machine rolled and yet it stepped; it kept itself horizon-level as it ran, its long endless treads dipping and rising with the terrain, its sleek body moving smooth as a swan. It stopped and then went forward, out to the first of a field of stakes that a crew had been driving.

  The flat, gleaming sides of the machine opened away and forward and locked, and became a single blade twice the width of the machine. It dropped until its sharp lower edge just touched the ground, checked for a moment, and then sank into the soil.