A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  And these were the pictures of the Fountain Itself …

  And such were the tortures of those who were exiled, imprisoned and damned.

  She lay there and hated the moonlight; the moon she regarded as ugly and vulgar and new. It seemed to her an added lash, as were all things similar and all things contrasting to the world she had lost. She turned eyes grown cold on the sleeping man, and curled her lip; the creature was a clever counterpart, a subtle caricature, of the worst of the men of her race, in no way perfect, in no way magnificent, but in no way so crude an artifact as to permit her to forget what was surely its original.

  By comparison and by contrast, Earth, this muddy, uncouth ball of offal, pinioned her soul to her home. Earth had everything that could be found on her world—after a fashion—racecourses comparatively an armspan wide, racing dun rats ridden by newts in sleazy silks … men whose eyes sparkled in the sun not quite as much as her racial brother’s might when he, with only his shaded hand to help him, sought and found a ghostly nebula.

  Cell by interlocking cell, ion by osmotic particle, she belonged elsewhere. And Earth, which was her world falsified; and the endless music, which was her world in truth—these would never let her forget it.

  So she cursed the moonbeams and the music sliding down them, and swore that she would not be broken. She could soak herself in this petty planet, zip it up to her neck to conceal anything of her real self in her pettiest acts; she could don the bearing and the thoughts themselves of Earth’s too-fine, too-empty puppets and still inwardly she would be herself, a citizen of her world, part of the Fountain Itself. As long as she was that, in any fiber, she could not be completely an exile. Excommunicated she might be; bodily removed, wingless and crawling, trembling under the dear constant breath of her home; but until she broke, her jailers had failed for all their might and righteousness.

  The sun rose and turned her away from her bitterness, a little.

  Chan’s sleeping consciousness came close and roared around her, fell back into blacknesses. She rose and went to the door. The sea was rose-gold and breathing and the sun was aloft, a shade too near, too yellow, and too small. She damned it heartily with a swift thought that spouted and spread and hung in the air like the mist from a fountain, and went and dressed.

  She glanced at the percolator, understood it, and deftly made coffee. At its first whisper in the tube, Chan sighed and his consciousness came upward with a rush. Drusilla slipped outside. Patience she had in full measure, but she felt it unworthy to tap it for such unwieldy formalities as she knew she must witness if she stayed in the room during the cracking of his nylon chrysalis.

  There was a hoarse shout from inside, a violent floundering, and then Chandler Behringer appeared. He was tousled and frightened. His panic, she noted, had been sufficient to drive him outdoors without his shirt, but not without his trousers. He squeezed his eyelids so tight shut that his cheekbones seemed to rise; then opened them and saw her standing by the beach margin. The radiance that came from his face competed for a moment with the early tilting sunlight.

  “I thought you’d gone.”

  She smiled. “No.”

  She came to him. His eyes devoured her. He raised both hands together and placed them, one on the other, on his left collarbone. She understood that he was concealing the vestigial nipples (which were absent in males of her race) with his wrists. She examined this reflex with some curiosity, and filed away for future puzzlement the fact that he did this because he wore trousers; had they been bathing trunks, the reflex would not have appeared. He took a breath so deep that she empathized his pain.

  “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” he said.

  She did not doubt it, and had no comment.

  “The most beautiful woman who ever lived,” he murmured.

  Abruptly she turned her back, and now it was her eyes which squeezed shut. “I am not!” she said in a tone so saturated with hatred and violence that he stepped back almost into the doorway.

  Without another word she strode off, down the beach, her direction chosen solely by the way she happened to be facing at the time. In a moment she was conscious of his feet padding after her.

  “Dru, Dru, don’t go!” he panted. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, hah! to do anything that hah! oh, I was only”

  She stopped and turned so abruptly that had he taken two more steps they would have collided. Far from taking steps, however, he had all he could do to stay upright.

  She stood looking at him, unmoving. On her face was no particular expression; but there was that in the high-held head, the slightly distended nostrils, the splendid balance of her stance, and her gracefully held, powerful hands that made approach impossible. His eyes were quite round and his lips slightly parted. He extended one hand and moved his mouth silently, then let the hand fall. His knees began to tremble visibly.

  She turned again and walked away. He stood there for a long time watching her go. When she was simply a brilliant fleck on the brightening dunes, the purposeless hand came forward again.

  “Dru?” he said, in a voice softened to soprano inaudibility by all the cautions of awe. And she was gone, and he turned slowly, as if he had a tall and heavy weight on his rounded shoulders, and plodded back to the cabin.

  She found a road which paralleled the beach and climbed to it. Fools cluster about the Universe, she thought, like bubbles about the fountain pool, shifting and pulsing at random, without design, purpose or function. She had left such a fool and she was such a fool. There was far more culpability in her folly than in that of the man. He had little control over what he might say, and less understanding, because of his nature and his limitations. Neither his faculties nor his conditioning could enable him to understand why she felt such fury.

  She stabbed her heels into the sandy roadbed as she walked. She ground her teeth. The most beautiful woman who ever lived …

  Her beauty!

  Where, exile—where, criminal, has your beauty brought you?

  She strode on, her mood so black it all but eclipsed the torture music.

  Perhaps fifteen minutes later, she became conscious of a shrill ultrasonic, a rapidly pulsing, urgent, growing thing that would be a silence to all but her. She slowed, stopped finally. The sound came from behind her, but she would not confuse her analysis by looking back. She listened as an intervening wind carried the vibrations away and then let them come back again, nearer, stronger. She sensitized her bare feet; she raised an arm and took the vibrations on the back of her hand. She became conscious of synchronous sounds.

  Something rotated at approximately thirty-eight hundred and forty rpm. Something was chain-driven and the chain was not a metal. Something pounded … no, paced—something rolled endless soft cleats on the earth. She heard the straining of coil springs, the labored slide of heavy transverse leaf-springs, the make-and-break in the meniscus of the oil guarding busy pistons.

  The utter stupidity of so complex a thing as an automobile was, to her, more wondrous than a rainbow.

  At last she turned to look, and in a moment she saw it climb a rise some two miles away. The piercing ultrasonic was beyond bearing, and she adjusted her hearing to eliminate everything between eighty-six and eighty-eight thousand cycles.

  More comfortable now, she waited patiently. The car slid down a straight and gentle grade toward her, spitting sunlight through its chromium teeth, palming aside the morning air and pressing it back and down its sleek flanks, while underneath, where there was no hint of fairing, air shocked and roiled and shuddered and troubled what dust it could find in the sandy road. It was a very large and very new car. Drusilla watched it, wide-eyed. She came to wonder what conclusions one would have regarding these—these savages, if one knew nothing of them but such a vehicle. What manner of man streamlines only where he can see?

  The lovely thought, then: It’s a world of clowns.

  She smiled; the driver saw it and his foot came down on the brake pedal. The car t
hrew down its glittering baroque nose, slid a hand’s breadth, and lowered itself sitzwise into its warm bath of springs.

  The driver’s eyes were long and flat and his nose and chin were sharp. Drusilla watched what he was doing, which was watching himself watch her.

  Suddenly he said, “How far is it to—” and before the first word was spoken, she knew he was completely familiar with these roads.

  She said, “Your—” and raised her hand to point accurately at the hood, while she searched him for the term. “Your rocker-arm’s not getting oil. The third one from the front.” Even while the motor idled, the soundless shriek of that dry friction would have been unbearable had she let it.

  “Sounds all right to me,” he shrugged. He looked—he journeyed, rather—down from her eyes, down until he saw that her feet were bare. He left his gaze where it was and said, “Let me give you a lift.” He half turned then, reached one thin spidery arm back and across without looking, and the rear door swung open.

  Drusilla took one step forward and only then saw that the man was not alone in the car. She stopped, amazed—not at the woman who sat there, but at the fact that perceptions such as hers had missed so much. She glanced at the man, and realized that it was his feeling, or lack of it, that had numbed and blinded her to everything about the woman who sat beside him. She was companion reduced to presence, minified to fixture, reduced to a very limbo of familiarity. Drusilla stared at her, and the woman stared back.

  She was a small woman, compact, so coiffed and clad that she was only a blandness. What kept her from being featureless as an egg was a pair of achingly blue eyes large enough for a being half again her size, and a perfect mouth painted such a transcendental, pupil-shrinking red that surely it would melt fuse-wire. Her wide eyes were blank.

  To Drusilla’s horror, a growth like an iridescent liver sprang into being between the flaming lips, grew to the size of a fist and collapsed limply. The lips parted a pink tongue deftly caught, cleared, and drew the limp matter back between an even flicker of paper-white teeth. And again the face was molded and smooth and motionless.

  “My wife,” said the man, “so you’re chaperoned. My God, Lu, you got bubble gum again.” The woman took her gaze away from Drusilla and placed it on the driver, but there was otherwise no change. “Get in.”

  Drusilla’s mind played back a fleeting inner sensation she had taken from him when he had said “My wife.” It was … pride? No. Admiration? Hardly! Compliment; that was it. This woman was a compliment he paid himself. He had no tiny fleck of doubt that he was admired for her careful finish.

  The big blue eyes swung to her again and she probed.

  For a ghastly micro-second, she had all the sensations of walking into a snakepit with chloroform on her scarf. She recoiled violently, moved far back to the low bank; and she shuddered.

  “Come on, uh, hey, what’s the matter?” the driver called.

  Drusilla shook her head twice, not so much in refusal as in an attempt to escape from something that was laying clammy strands of silk on her face and hair. Without another word, she turned and walked away down the road, behind the car.

  “Hey!”

  Drusilla did not look back.

  He started the car and drove off slowly. In a moment, the woman leaned forward and tugged hard on the wheel. The car heeled back on the road, and at last he took his eyes from the rear view mirror.

  “Now what’s with her?” he demanded of the windshield wiper.

  Lu blew another bubble.

  When the car was gone, Drusilla went slowly back and past the place she had met it, and on toward the town. From her marrow she swore a mighty oath that never again would she be trapped into sending her probes into such a revolting mess. The driver hadn’t been like that; Chan Behringer hadn’t. Yet she knew with a terrible certainty that there must be thousands like that creature here on the prison planet.

  So as she walked she devised something, a hair-triggered synaptic structure, a reaction pattern that could, even without her conscious knowledge, detect the faintest beginnings of a presence such as this; and it would snap down her shields, isolate her, protect her, keep her clean.

  She was badly shaken. The presence of that woman had shaken her, but the most devastating thing of all was the knowledge that she could be shaken. It was a realization most difficult for her to absorb; it had little precedent in her cosmos.

  Walking, she shuddered again.

  Drusilla came to the town and wandered until she found a restaurant which needed a waitress. She borrowed the price of a pair of beach sandals from the weary cashier and went to work. She found a little room and at the end of the second day she had the price of a cotton dress.

  In the second week she was a stenographer and, in the second month secretary to the head of a firm which made boat-sails and awnings. She invested quietly, sold some poems, a song, two articles and a short story. In terms of her environment, she did very well indeed, very fast. In her own estimate, she did nothing but force her attention randomly away from her torture.

  For the torture, of course, continued. She bore it with outward composure, shucked it off as casually as, from time to time, she changed her name, her job, her hair-styling and her accent. But like the lessons she learned, like the knowledge of the people she met and worked with, the torture accumulated. She could estimate her capacity for it. It was large, but not infinite. She could get rid of none of it, any more than she could get rid of knowledge. It could be compacted and stored. As long as she could do this with the torture, she was undefeated. But she was quite capable of calculating intake against capacity and she had not much time. A year and a half, two …

  She would stand at the window, absorbing her punishment, staring up into the night sky with her bright wise eyes. She could not see the guardian ships, of course, but she knew they were there. She knew of their killer-boats which could, if necessary, slip down in moments and blast a potential escapee, or one about to violate the few simple rules of a prisoner’s conduct.

  Sometimes, objectively, she marveled at the cruel skill of the torture. Music alone, with its ineffable spectrum of sadness and longing and wild nostalgic joy, could have been enough and more than enough for a prisoner to bear; but the sensory pictures, the stimulative and restimulative flow and change of taste and motion and all the subtleties of the kinetic senses—these, mixed and mingled with music, charging in where music lulled, marching in the footprints of the music’s rhythmic stride—these were the things which laughed at her barriers, sparred with her, giggling; met her fists with a breeze, her rapier with a gas, her advances with a disappearance.

  There was no fighting attacks like these. Ignorance would have been a defense, but was of no use to her who was so nerve-alive to all the torture’s sense and symbolism. All she could do was to absorb, compact, and hope that she could find a defense before she broke.

  So she lived and outwardly prospered. She met some humans who amused her briefly, and others she avoided after one or two meetings because they reminded her so painfully of her own people—a smile, a stride, a matching of colors. If she met any others with the terrifying quality of the woman in the car, she was not aware of it; that part of her defense, at least, was secure.

  But the torture still poured down upon her, and after half a year she knew she must take some steps to counteract it. At base, the solution was simple. If she did nothing, the torture would crush her, and there was no surcease in that, for having broken, she would go on suffering it. She could kill herself, but that in itself would fulfill the terms of her sentence—“life imprisonment—with torture.” There was only one way—to be killed, and to be killed by the guardians. She was not under a death sentence. If she forced one, they would have; to violate their own penalty, and she would be able to die unbroken, as befits a Citizen of the Fountain Itself.

  More and more she studied the sky, knowing of the undetectible presence of the guardians and their killer-boats, knowing that if she could thi
nk of it, there must be a way to bring one of them careening silently down on her to snuff her out. She made sendings of many kinds—even of the kind she had used to extinguish the life-force of the Preceptor—without altering the quality or degree of torture in the slightest.

  Perhaps the guardians sent, but did not receive; perhaps nothing could touch them. Geared to the pattern of a Citizen’s mind and conditioning, they patiently produced that which must, in time, destroy it. The destruction would be because of the weakness of the attacked. Drusilla wanted to be destroyed through the strength of the attacker. The distinction was, to her, clear and vital.

  There had to be a way, if only she could think of it.

  There was, and she did.

  He came onstage grinning like a boy, swinging his guitar carelessly. The set was a living room. He plumped down on a one-armed easy-chair and hooked a brown-and-white hassock toward him with his heel. There was applause.

  “Thank you, Mother,” said Chan Behringer. He slipped the plectrum from under the first and second strings. Dru thought Your low D is one one-hundred-twenty-eighth tone sharp.

  Deftly, out of sight of the audience, he plugged in the pickup cable. Dru watched attentively. She had never seen a twelve-string guitar before.

  He began to play. He played competently, with neither mistakes nor imagination. There was a five-stage amplifier built into his chair and a foot-pedal tone control and electronic vibrato in the hassock. A rough cutoff at twenty-seven thousand cycles, she realized, and then remembered that, to most humans, response flat to eight thousand is high fidelity.

  She was immensely pleased with the electrical pickups; she had not noticed them at first, which was a compliment to him. One was magnetic, sunk into the fingerboard at the fourteenth fret. The other was a contact microphone, obviously inside the box, directly under the bridge. The either-or-both switch was audible when he moved it, which she thought disgraceful.