More Than Human

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “When that mind is submerged, working at cross-purposes with the surface mind, then you’re all confused. Now in your case, I can see the thing you’re pointing at—that in order to preserve or to rebuild that peculiar bond between you kids, you had to get rid of Miss Kew. But I don’t see the logic. I don’t see that regaining that ‘bleshing’ was worth destroying this new-found security which you admit was enjoyable.”

  I said desperately, “Maybe it wasn’t worth destroying it.”

  Stern leaned forward and pointed his pipe at me. “It was because it made you do what you did. After the fact, maybe things look different. But when you were moved to do it, the important thing was to destroy Miss Kew and regain this thing you’d had before. I don’t see why and neither do you.”

  “How are we going to find out?”

  “Well, let’s get to the most unpleasant part, if you’re up to it.”

  I lay down. “I’m ready.”

  “All right. Tell me everything that happened just before you killed her.”

  I fumbled through that last day, trying to taste the food, hear the voices. A thing came and went and came again: it was the crisp feeling of the sheets. I thrust it away because it was at the beginning of that day, but it came back again, and I realized it was at the end, instead.

  I said, “What I just told you, all that about the children doing things other people’s way instead of their own, and Baby not talking, and everyone happy about it, and finally that I had to kill Miss Kew. It took a long time to get to that, and a long time to start doing it. I guess I lay in bed and thought for four hours before I got up again. It was dark and quiet. I went out of the room and down the hall and into Miss Kew’s bedroom and killed her.”

  “How?”

  “That’s all there is!” I shouted, as loud as I could. Then I quieted down. “It was awful dark … it still is. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. She did love us. I know she did. But I had to kill her.”

  “All right, all right,” Stern said. “I guess there’s no need to get too gruesome about this. You’re—”

  “What?”

  “You’re quite strong for your age, aren’t you, Gerard?”

  “I guess so. Strong enough, anyway.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I still don’t see that logic you were talking about.” I began to hammer on the couch with my fist, hard, once for each word: “Why—did—I—have—to—go—and—do—that?”

  “Cut that out,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

  “I ought to get hurt,” I said.

  “Ah?” said Stern.

  I got up and went to the desk and got some water. “What am I going to do?”

  “Tell me what you did after you killed her, right up until the time you came here.”

  “Not much,” I said. “It was only last night. I took her checkbook. I went back to my room, sort of numb. I put all my clothes on except my shoes. I carried them. I went out. Walked a long time, trying to think, went to the bank when it opened. Cashed a check for eleven hundred bucks. Got the idea of getting some help from a psychiatrist, spent most of the day looking for one, came here. That’s all.”

  “Didn’t you have any trouble cashing the check?”

  “I never have any trouble making people do what I want them to do.”

  He gave a surprised grunt.

  “I know what you’re thinking—I couldn’t make Miss Kew do what I wanted.”

  “That’s part of it,” he admitted.

  “If I had of done that,” I told him, “she wouldn’t of been Miss Kew any more. Now the banker—all I made him do was be a banker.”

  I looked at him and suddenly realized why he fooled with the pipe all the time. It was so he could look down at it and you wouldn’t be able to see his eyes.

  “You killed her,” he said—and I knew he was changing the subject—“and destroyed something that was valuable to you. It must have been less valuable to you than the chance to rebuild this thing you used to have with the other kids. And you’re not sure of the value of that.” He looked up. “Does that describe your main trouble?”

  “Just about.”

  “You know the single thing that makes people kill?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Survival. To save the self or something which identifies with the self. And in this case that doesn’t apply, because your setup with Miss Kew had far more survival value for you, singly and as a group, than the other.”

  “So maybe I just didn’t have a good enough reason to kill her.”

  “You had, because you did it. We just haven’t located it yet. I mean we have the reason, but we don’t know why it was important enough. The answer is somewhere in you.”

  “Where?”

  He got up and walked some. “We have a pretty consecutive life-story here. There’s fantasy mixed with the fact, of course, and there are areas in which we have no detailed information, but we have a beginning and a middle and an end. Now I can’t say for sure, but the answer may be in that bridge you refused to cross a while back. Remember?”

  I remembered all right. I said, “Why that? Why can’t we try something else?”

  He quietly pointed out, “Because you just said it. Why are you shying away from it?”

  “Don’t go making big ones out of little ones,” I said. Sometimes the guy annoyed me. “That bothers me. I don’t know why, but it does.”

  “Something’s lying hidden in there and you’re bothering it so it’s fighting back. Anything that fights to stay concealed is very possibly the thing we’re after. Your trouble is concealed, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes,” I said, and I felt that sickness and faintness again, and again I pushed it away. Suddenly I wasn’t going to be stopped any more. “Let’s go get it.” I lay down.

  He let me watch the ceiling and listen to silence for a while, and then he said, “You’re in the library. You’ve just met Miss Kew. She’s talking to you; you’re telling her about the children.”

  I lay very still. Nothing happened. Yes, it did; I got tense inside all over, from the bones out, more and more. When it got as bad as it could, still nothing happened.

  I heard him get up and cross the room to the desk. He fumbled there for a while; things clicked and hummed. Suddenly I heard my own voice:

  “Well, there’s Janie, she’s eleven like me. And Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they’re twins, and Baby. Baby is three.”

  And the sound of my own scream—

  And nothingness.

  Sputtering out of the darkness. I came up flailing with my fists. Strong hands caught my wrists. They didn’t check my arms; they just grabbed and rode. I opened my eyes. I was soaking wet. The thermos lay on its side on the rug. Stern was crouched beside me, holding my wrists. I quit struggling.

  “What happened?”

  He let me go and stood back watchfully. “Lord,” he said, “what a charge!”

  I held my head and moaned. He threw me a hand-towel and I used it. “What hit me?”

  “I’ve had you on tape the whole time,” he explained. “When you wouldn’t get into the recollection, I tried to nudge you into it by using your own voice as you recounted it before. It works wonders sometimes.”

  “It worked wonders this time,” I growled. “I think I blew a fuse.”

  “In effect, you did. You were on the trembling verge of going into the thing you don’t want to remember, and you let yourself go unconscious rather than do it.”

  “What are you so pleased about?”

  “Last-ditch defense,” he said tersely. “We’ve got it now. Just one more try.”

  “Now hold on. The last-ditch defense is that I drop dead.”

  “You won’t. You’ve contained this episode in your subconscious mind for a long time and it hasn’t hurt you.”

  “Hasn’t it?”

  “Not in terms of killing you.”

  “How do you know it won’t when we drag it out?”

  “You’ll see.”
>
  I looked up at him sideways. Somehow he struck me as knowing what he was doing.

  “You know a lot more about yourself now than you did at the time,” he explained softly. “You can apply insight. You can evaluate it as it comes up. Maybe not completely, but enough to protect yourself. Don’t worry. Trust me. I can stop it if it gets too bad. Now just relax. Look at the ceiling. Be aware of your toes. Don’t look at your toes. Look straight up. Your toes, your big toes. Don’t move your toes, but feel them. Count outward from your big toes, one count for each toe. One, two, three. Feel that third toe. Feel the toe, feel it, feel it go limp, go limp, go limp. The toe next to it on both sides gets limp. So limp because your toes are limp, all of your toes are limp—”

  “What are you doing?” I shouted at him.

  He said in the same silky voice, “You trust me and so do your toes trust me. They’re all limp because you trust me. You—”

  “You’re trying to hypnotize me. I’m not going to let you do that.”

  “You’re going to hypnotize yourself. You do everything yourself. I just point the way. I point your toes to the path. Just point your toes. No one can make you go anywhere you don’t want to go, but you want to go where your toes are pointed where your toes are limp where your …”

  On and on and on. And where was the dangling gold ornament, the light in the eyes, the mystic passes? He wasn’t even sitting where I could see him. Where was the talk about how sleepy I was supposed to be? Well, he knew I wasn’t sleepy and didn’t want to be sleepy. I just wanted to be toes. I just wanted to be limp, just a limp toe. No brains in a toe, a toe to go, go, go eleven times, eleven, I’m eleven …

  I split in two, and it was all right, the part that watched the part that went back to the library, and Miss Kew leaning toward me, but not too near, me with the newspaper crackling under me on the library chair, me with one shoe off and my limp toes dangling … and I felt a mild surprise at this. For this was hypnosis, but I was quite conscious, quite altogether there on the couch with Stern droning away at me, quite able to roll over and sit up and talk to him and walk out if I wanted to, but I just didn’t want to. Oh, if this was what hypnosis was like, I was all for it. I’d work at this. This was all right.

  There on the table I’m able to see that the gold will unfold on the leather, and whether I’m able to stay by the table with you, with Miss Kew, with Miss Kew …

  “… and Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they’re twins, and Baby. Baby is three.”

  “Baby is three,” she said.

  There was a pressure, a stretching apart, and a … a breakage. And with a tearing agony and a burst of triumph that drowned the pain, it was done.

  And this is what was inside. All in one flash, but all this.

  Baby is three? My baby would be three if there were a baby, which there never was…

  Lone, I’m open to you. Open, is this open enough?

  His irises like wheels. I’m sure they spin, but I never catch them at it. The probe that passes invisibly from his brain, through his eyes, into mine. Does he know what it means to me? Does he care? He doesn’t care, he doesn’t know; he empties me and I fill as he directs me to; he drinks and waits and drinks again and never looks at the cup.

  When I saw him first, I was dancing in the wind, in the wood, in the wild, and I spun about and he stood there in the leafy shadows, watching me. I hated him for it. It was not my wood, not my gold-spangled fern-tangled glen. But it was my dancing that he took, freezing it forever by being there. I hated him for it, hated the way he looked, the way he stood, ankle-deep in the kind wet ferns, looking like a tree with roots for feet and clothes the color of earth. As I stopped he moved, and then he was just a man, a great ape-shouldered, dirty animal of a man, and all my hate was fear suddenly and I was just as frozen.

  He knew what he had done and he didn’t care. Dancing … never to dance again, because never would I know the woods were free of eyes, free of tall, uncaring, dirty animal-men. Summer days with the clothes choking me, winter nights with the precious decencies round and about me like a shroud, and never to dance again, never to remember dancing without remembering the shock of knowing he had seen me. How I hated him! Oh, how I hated him!

  To dance alone where no one knew, that was the single thing I hid to myself when I was known as Miss Kew, that Victorian, older than her years, later than her time; correct and starched, lace and linen and lonely. Now indeed I would be all they said, through and through, forever and ever, because he had robbed me of the one thing I dared to keep secret.

  He came out into the sun and walked to me, holding his great head a little on one side. I stood where I was, frozen inwardly and outwardly and altogether by the core of anger and the layer of fear. My arm was still out, my waist still bent from my dance, and when he stopped, I breathed again because by then I had to.

  He said, “You read books?”

  I couldn’t bear to have him near me, but I couldn’t move. He put out his hard hand and touched my jaw, turned my head up until I had to look into his face. I cringed away from him, but my face would not leave his hand, though he was not holding it, just lifting it. “You got to read some books for me. I got no time to find them.”

  I asked him, “Who are you?”

  “Lone,” he said. “You going to read books for me?”

  “No. Let me go, let me go!” He wasn’t holding me.

  “What books?” I cried.

  He thumped my face, not very hard. It made me look up a bit more. He dropped his hand away. His eyes, the irises were going to spin….

  “Open up in there,” he said. “Open way up and let me see.”

  There were books in my head, and he was looking at the titles … he was not looking at the titles, for he couldn’t read. He was looking at what I knew of the books. I suddenly felt terribly useless, because I had only a fraction of what he wanted.

  “What’s that?” he barked.

  I knew what he meant. He’d gotten it from inside my head. I didn’t know it was in there, even, but he found it.

  “Telekinesis,” I said.

  “How is it done?”

  “Nobody knows if it can be done. Moving physical objects with the mind!”

  “It can be done,” he said. “This one?”

  “Teleportation. That’s the same thing—well, almost. Moving your own body with mind power.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I see it,” he said gruffly.

  “Molecular interpenetration. Telepathy and clairvoyance. I don’t know anything about them. I think they’re silly.”

  “Read about ’em. It don’t matter if you understand or not. What’s this?”

  It was there in my brain, on my lips. “Gestalt.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Group. Like a cure for a lot of diseases with one kind of treatment. Like a lot of thoughts expressed in one phrase. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

  “Read about that, too. Read a whole lot about that. That’s the most you got to read about. That’s important.”

  He turned away, and when his eyes came away from mine it was like something breaking, so that I staggered and fell to one knee. He went off into the woods without looking back. I got my things and ran home. There was anger, and it struck me like a storm. There was fear, and it struck me like a wind. I knew I would read the books, I knew I would come back, I knew I would never dance again.

  So I read the books and I came back. Sometimes it was every day for three or four days, and sometimes, because I couldn’t find a certain book, I might not come back for ten. He was always there in the little glen, waiting, standing in the shadows, and he took what he wanted of the books and nothing of me. He never mentioned the next meeting. If he came there every day to wait for me, or if he only came when I did, I have no way of knowing.

  He made me read books that contained nothing for me, books on evolution, on social and cultural organization, on mythology, and ever so much on symbiosis. What I had with hi
m were not conversations; sometimes nothing audible would pass between us but his grunt of surprise or small, short hum of interest.

  He tore the books out of me the way he would tear berries from a bush, all at once; he smelled of sweat and earth and the green juices his heavy body crushed when he moved through the wood.

  If he learned anything from the books, it made no difference in him.

  There came a day when he sat by me and puzzled something out.

  He said, “What book has something like this?” Then he waited for a long time, thinking. “The way a termite can’t digest wood, you know, and microbes in the termite’s belly can, and what the termite eats is what the microbe leaves behind. What’s that?”

  “Symbiosis,” I remembered. I remembered the words. Lone tore the content from words and threw the words away. “Two kinds of life depending upon one another for existence.”

  “Yeah. Well, is there a book about four-five kinds doing that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Then he asked, “What about this? You got a radio station, you got four-five receivers, each receiver is fixed up to make something different happen, like one digs and one flies and one makes noise, but each one takes orders from the one place. And each one has its own power and its own thing to do, but they are all apart. Now: is there life like that, instead of radio?”

  “Where each organism is a part of the whole, but separated? I don’t think so … unless you mean social organizations, like a team, or perhaps a gang of men working, all taking orders from the same boss.”

  “No,” he said immediately, “not like that. Like one single animal.” He made a gesture with his cupped hand which I understood.

  I asked, “You mean a gestalt life-form? It’s fantastic.”

  “No book has about that, huh?”

  “None I ever heard of.”

  “I got to know about that,” he said heavily. “There is such a thing. I want to know if it ever happened before.”

  “I can’t see how anything of the sort could exist.”

  “It does. A part that fetches, a part that figures, a part that finds out, and a part that talks.”

  “Talks? Only humans talk.”