A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

He finished his number, drawled a few lines of patter, asked for and played a couple of requests and an encore, by which time Drusilla had left the theater and was talking to the stage doorman. He took the paper parcel she handed him and sent it to the dressing rooms via the callboy.

  In a matter of seconds, there was a wild whoop from backstage and Chan Behringer came bounding down the iron steps, clutching a wild flannel shirt, a pair of blue dungarees, and some tatters of paper and string.

  “Dru! Dru!” he gasped. He ran to her, his arms out. Then he stopped, faltered, put his head very slightly to one side. “Dru,” he said again, softly.

  “Hello, Chan.”

  “I never thought I’d see you again.”

  “I had to return your things.”

  “Too good to be true,” he murmured. “I—we—” Suddenly he turned to the goggling doorman and tossed the clothes to him. “Hang on to these for me, will you, George?” To Drusilla he said, “I should take ’em backstage, but I’m afraid to let you out of my sight.”

  “I won’t run away again.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. He took her arm, and again there was the old echo of a shock he had once felt at the touch of her flesh through fabric.

  They went to a place, all soft lights and leather, and they talked about the beach and the city and show business and guitar music, but not about her strange fury with him the morning she had stalked out of his life.

  “You’ve changed,” he said at length.

  “Have I?”

  “You were like—like a queen before. Now you’re like a princess.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “More … human.”

  She laughed. “I wasn’t exactly human when you first met me. I’d had a bad time. I’m all right now, Chan. I—didn’t want to see you until I was all right.”

  They talked until it was time for his next act, and after that they had dinner.

  She saw him the next day, and the next.

  The chubby man with a face like a cobbler and hands like a surgeon made the most beautiful guitars in the world. He sprang to his feet when the tall girl came in. It was the first time he had paid such a courtesy in fourteen years.

  “Can you cut an F-slot that looks like this?” she demanded.

  He looked at the drawing she laid on the counter, grunted, then said, “Sure, lady. But why?”

  She launched into a discussion which, at first, he did not hear, for it was in his field and in his language and he was too astonished to think. But once into it, he very rapidly learned things about resonance, harmonic reinforcement, woods, varnishes and reverse-cantilever designs that were in no book he had ever heard about.

  When she left a few minutes later, he hung gasping to the counter. In front of him was a check for work ordered. In his hand was a twenty-dollar bill for silence. In his mind was a flame and a great wonderment.

  She spilled a bottle of nail polish remover on Chan’s guitar. He was kind and she was pathetically contrite. It was all right, he said; he knew a place that could retouch it before evening. They went there together. The little man with the cobbler’s face handed over the new instrument, a guitar with startling slots, an ultra-precision bridge, a fingerboard that crept into his hand as if it were alive and loved him. He chorded it once, and at the tone he put it reverently down and stared. His eyes were wet.

  “It’s yours,” Drusilla twinkled. “Look—your name inlaid on the neck-back.”

  “I know your guitars,” said Chan to the chubby man, “but I never heard of anything like this.”

  “Tricks to every trade,” said the man, and winked.

  Drusilla slipped him another twenty as they left.

  The electronics engineer stared at the schematic diagram. “It won’t work.”

  “Yes, it will,” said Drusilla. “Can you build it?”

  “Well, gosh, yes, but who ever heard of voltage control like this? Where’s the juice supposed to go from …” He leaned closer. “Well, I’ll be damned. Who designed this?”

  “Build it,” she said.

  He did. It worked. Drusilla wired it into the prop armchair and Chan never knew anything had been changed. He attributed everything to the new instrument as he became more familiar with it and began to exploit its possibilities. Suddenly there were no more layoffs. No more road trips, either. The clubs began to take important notice of the shy young man with the tear-your-heart-out guitar.

  She stole his vitamin pills and replaced them with something else. She invited him to dinner at her apartment and he fainted in the middle of the fish course.

  He came to seven hours later on the couch, long after the strange induction baker and the rack of impulse hypodermics had been hidden away. He remembered absolutely nothing. He was lying on his left arm and it ached.

  Dru told him he had fallen asleep and she had just let him sleep it out.

  “Poor dear, you’ve been working too hard.”

  He told her somewhat harshly that she must never let him sleep like that, cutting off the circulation in his fingering arm.

  The next day, the arm was worse and he had to cancel a date. On the third day, it was back to normal, one hundred per cent, and on the fourth, fifth, and sixth days it continued to improve. And what it could do on the fingerboard was past description. Which was hardly surprising: there was not another arm on Earth like it, with its heavier nerve-fibers, the quadrupling of the relay-nodes on the medullary sheaths, the low-resistance, super-reactive axones, and the isotopic potassium and sodium which drenched them.

  “I don’t play this damn thing any more,” he said. “I just think the stuff and that left hand reads my mind.”

  He made three records in three months, and the income from them increased cubically each time. Then the record company decided to save money and put him under a long-term contract at a higher rate than anyone had ever been paid before.

  Chan, without consulting Drusilla, bought one of a cluster of very exclusive houses just over the city line. The neighbors on the left were the Kerslers, whose grandfather had made their money in off-the-floor sanitary fixtures. The neighbors on the right were the Mullings you know, Osprey Mullings, the writer, two books a year, year in and year out, three out of four of them making Hollywood.

  Chan invited the Kerslers and the Mullings to his housewarming, and took Drusilla out there to surprise her.

  She was surprised, all right. Kersler had a huge model railroad in his cellar and his mind likewise contained a great many precise minutiae, only one of which was permitted to operate at a time. Grace Kersler’s mind was like an empty barn solidly lined with pink frosting. Osprey Mullings’ head contained a set of baby’s blocks of limited number, with which he constructed his novels by a ritualistic process of rearrangement. But Luellen Mullings was the bland-faced confection who secretly chewed bubble gum and who had so jolted Drusilla that day on the beach road.

  It was a chatty and charming party, and it was the very first time that humans had been capable of irritating Drusilla so much that she had to absorb the annoyance rather than ignore it. She bore this attack on her waning capacities with extreme graciousness, and at parting, the Kerslers and the Mullings pressed Chan’s hand and wished him luck with that beautiful Drusilla Strange, you lucky fellow you.

  And late at night, full to bursting with success and security and a fine salting of ambition, Chan drove her back to town and at her apartment, he proposed to her.

  She held both his hands and cried a little, and promised to work with him and to help him even more in the future—but, “Please, please, Chan, never ask me that again.”

  He was hurt and baffled, but he kept his promise.

  Chan studied music seriously now—he never had before. He had to. He was giving concerts rather than performances, and he played every showcase piece ever composed by one virtuoso to madden and frustrate the others. He played all of the famous violin cadenzi on his guitar as well. He made arrangements of the arrangements.
He did all this with the light contempt of a Rubinstein examining a two-dollar lesson in chord-vamping. So at length he had no recourse but to compose. Some of his stuff was pretty advanced. All of it took you by the throat and held you.

  One Sunday afternoon, “Try this,” said Drusilla. She hummed a tone or two, then burst into a cascade of notes that brought Chan up standing.

  “God, Dru!”

  “Try it,” she said.

  He got his guitar. His left hand ran over the fingerboard like a perplexed little animal, and he struck a note or two.

  “No,” she said, “this.” She sang.

  “Oh,” he whispered. Watching her, he played. When she seemed not pleased, he stopped.

  “No,” she said. “Chan, I can only sing one note at a time. You have twelve strings.” She paused, thoughtfully, listening. “Chan, if I asked you to play that theme, and then to—to paint pictures on it with your guitar, would that make sense?”

  “You usually make sense.”

  She smiled at him. “All right. Play that theme, and with it, play the way a tree grows. Play the way the bud leads the twig and the twig cuts up into space to make a hole for the branch. No,” she said quickly, as his eyes brightened and his right thumb and forefinger tightened on the plectrum, “not yet. There’s more.”

  He waited.

  She closed her eyes. Almost inaudibly, she hummed something. Then she said, “At the same time, put in all the detail of a tree that has already grown.” She opened her eyes and looked straight at him. “That will consolidate,” she said factually, “because a tree is only the graphic trajectory of its buds.”

  He looked at her strangely. “You’re quite a girl.”

  “Never mind that,” she said quickly. “Now put those three things together with a fountain. And that’s all.”

  “What kind of a fountain?”

  She paled, but her voice was easy. “Silly. The only kind of fountain that could be with that theme, the tree growing, and the tree grown.”

  He struck a chord. “I’ll try.”

  She hummed for him, then brought one long forefinger down. He picked up the theme from her voice. He closed his eyes. The guitar, of all instruments the most intimately expressive, given a magic sostenuto by its electronic graft, began to speak.

  The theme, the tree growing, the tree grown.

  Suddenly, the fountain, too.

  What happened then left them both breathless. Music of this nature should never be heard in a cubic volume smaller than its subject.

  When the pressured stridency of the music was quite gone, Chan looked at a cracked window pane and then turned to watch a talc-fine trickle of plaster dust stream down from the lintel of the french window.

  “Where,” he said, shaken, “did you get that little jangle?”

  “Thin air, darling,” said Drusilla blithely. “All the time, everywhere, whenever you like. Listen.”

  He cocked his head. There was an intense silence. His left hand crept up to the frets and spattered over them. In spite of the fact that he had not touched the strings with his right hand, a structure of sound hung in the room, reinforcing itself, holding, holding … finally dying.

  “That it?” he asked, awed.

  She held up a thumb and forefinger very close together. “About so much of it.”

  “How come I never heard it before?”

  “You weren’t ready.”

  His eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Damn it, Drusilla … you’re—you’ve done … Oh, hell, I don’t know, I love you so much.”

  She touched his face. “Shh. Play for me, Chan.”

  He breathed hard, thickly. “Not in here.”

  He put down his guitar and went to get the portable amplifier. They set it upon the rolling lawn and plugged in the guitar. Chan held the instrument for a silent moment, sliding his hand over its polished flank. He looked up suddenly and met Drusilla’s eyes. Chan’s face twisted, for her ecstasy and gaiety and triumph added up to something very like despair, and he did not understand.

  He would have thrown down the guitar then, for his heart was full of her, but she backed away, shaking her head lightly, and bent to the amplifier to switch it on. Her fingers pulled at the rotary switch as she turned it, and only she knew the nature of the mighty little transmitter that began to warm up along with the audio. She moved back still further; she did not want to be close to him when it—happened.

  He watched her for a moment, then looked down at the guitar. He watched his four enchanted left fingers hook and hover over the fingerboard; he looked at them with a vast puzzlement that slowly turned to raptness. He began to sway gently.

  Drusilla stood tall and taut, looking past him to the trees, to the scudding clouds and beyond. She dropped her shields and let the music pour in. And from the guitar came a note, another, two together, a strange chord. For this I shall be killed, she thought. To bring to the mighty scorn her people had of Earth and all things Earthly, this molded savage who could commune like a Citizen … this was the greatest affront.

  A foam of music fell and feathered and rushed inward to the Fountainhead Itself, and every voice of it smashed and hurtled upward. The paired sixth strings of the guitar flung up with them in a bullroar glissando that broke and spread glistening all over the keyboard, falling and falling away from a brittle high spatter of doubled first strings struck just barely below the bridge, metallic and needly; and if those taut strings were tied to a listener’s teeth, they could not be more intimate and shocking.

  The unique sound box found itself in sudden shrill resonance, and it woke the dark strings, the deep and mighty ones. They thrummed and sang without being touched; and Chan’s inhuman fingers found a figure in the middle register, folded it in on itself, broke it in two, and the broken pieces danced … and still the untouched strings hummed and droned, first one loud and then another as the resonances altered and responded.

  And all at once the air was filled with the sharp and dusty smell of ozone.

  With it all, the music, hers and Chan’s, settled itself down and down like some dark giant, pressing and sweeping and gathering in its drapes and folds as it descended to rest, to collect its roaring and crooning and tittering belongings all together that they may be pieced and piled and understood; until at last the monster was settled and neat, leaving a looming bulk of silence and an undertone of pumping life and multi-level quiet stripes of contemplation. The whole structure breathed, slowly and more slowly, held its breath, let a tension develop, rising, painful, agonizing, intolerable …

  “Play Red River Valley, hey, Chan?”

  Drusilla gasped, and the ozone rasped her throat. Chan’s fingers faltered, stopped. He half-turned, with a small, interrogative whimper.

  Standing on the other side of the far hedge, near her house, was Luellen Mullings, her doll-figure foiled like a glass diamond in a negligible playsuit, her golden hair free, her perfect jaw busy on her sticky cud.

  There was born in Drusilla a fury more feral, more concentrated, than any power of muscle or mind she had ever conceived of. Luellen Mullings, essence of all the degradation Earth was known for, all the cheapness, shallowness, ignorance and stupidity. She was the belch in the cathedral; she would befoul the Fountain Itself.

  “Hi, Dru, honey. Didn’t see you. Hey, I saw a feller at the Palace could play guitar holding it behind his back.” She sniffed. “What’s that funny smell? Like lightning or something.”

  “Get back in your house, you cheap little slut,” Drusilla hissed.

  “Hey, who you calling—” Luellen dipped down and picked up a smooth white stone twice the size of her fist. She raised it. Even Drusilla’s advanced reflexes were not fast enough to anticipate what she did. The stone left her hand like a bullet. Drusilla braced herself—but the stone did not come to her. It struck Chan just behind the ear. He pivoted on his heel three-quarters of a revolution, and quietly collapsed on the grass, the guitar nestling down against him like a loving cat.


  “Now look at what you made me do!” Luellen cried shrilly.

  Drusilla uttered a harpy’s scream and bounded across the lawn, her long hands spread out like talons. Luellen watched her come, round-eyed.

  There is a force in steady eyes by which a tiger may be made to turn away. It can make a strong man turn and run. There is a way to gather this force into a deadly nubbin and hurl it like a grenade. Drusilla knew how to do this, for she had done it before; she had killed with it. But the force she hurled at Luellen Mullings now was ten times what she had dealt the Preceptor.

  For a moment, the Universe went black, and then Drusilla became aware of a pressure on her face. There was another sensation, systemic, pervasive. Her legs, her arms, were weighted and tingly, and she seemed to have no torso at all.

  She gradually understood the sensation on her face. Moist earth and grass. She was lying on her stomach on the lawn. She absorbed this knowledge as if it were a complicated matrix of ideas which, if comprehended, might lead to hitherto unheard-of information. At last she realized what was wrong with her body. Oxygen starvation. She began to breathe again, hard, painful gasps, inflations that threatened to burst the pulmonary capillaries, exhalations that brought her diaphragm upward until it crushed in panic against the pounding cardium.

  She moved feebly, pulled a limp hand toward her, rested a moment with it flat on the grass near her shoulder. She began to press herself upward weakly, failed, rested a moment, and tried again. At last she raised herself to a sitting position.

  Chan lay where he had fallen, still as death, guitar nearby.

  Pop!

  Drusilla looked up. Over the hedge, like an artificial flower, nodded Luellen’s bright head. The quick deft tongue was retrieving the detritus of a broken bubble.

  Drusilla snarled and formed another bolt, and as it left her something like a huge soft mallet seemed to descend on her shoulder blades. Seated as she was, it folded her down until her chest struck the ground. Her hip joints crackled noisily. She writhed, straightened out, lay on her side gasping.

  Pop!

  Drusilla did not look up.

  Presently she heard Luellen’s light footsteps retreating down the gravel path. She gave herself over to a wave of weakness, and relaxed completely to let the strength flow back.