Slow Sculpture

by Theodore Sturgeon

  He took the hand by sheer reflex, and the little man, talking warmly, made a tiller of it and steered him over to one of the big chairs. He had his choice of sitting in it or falling into it; he sat, dumbfounded. “Dr. McHenry …!” Had this been the moment for small witticism, he might have added “… I presume.” He could presume; this was one of the world’s most famous faces, along with—oh my Lord, she was here too, Rachel Heinz McHenry; the Sunday-supplement cliché for this couple was “Twenty-first Century Curies.” She was a biochemist, if you like understatements, and her husband was the greatest living computer theorist, which means mathematics, logic, language, cybernetics, philosophy, electronics, and a number of sidelines. He never got the chance to get to his feet to shake Rachel McHenry’s hand; she was there to give it to him before he could even try, and was begging him to accept coffee. He refused, not because he didn’t want it but because it was a little like having the Pope scramble you some eggs. The whole thing was watched in (he thought) an amused fashion by the uniformed girl, who seemed quite at home here, though he found himself wishing she would take off the Dorne hat, with its shiny bill and the foreign-legion curtain around the back. The Dorne short-winged cape suited her; the hat did not.

  Dr. McHenry went back to his desk chair and sat down. He opened the flat center drawer and took out a yellow sheet and laid it down and said, “I’m going to come straight to the point, Lieutenant. Tonight you tried to kill Leader Dorne. I’d like to know how long you planned this.”

  Suddenly the little dash of pleased surprise evaporated, and this was a grim business again. “You know already. I understand you have access to a Mark VII XT.”

  “He designed it,” snapped the girl—perhaps a little defensively. Dr. McHenry held up pacifying hands to both of them. “Please,” he said. “You’re not being grilled, Lieutenant. Call it a rhetorical question. I was leading up to something else. You don’t have to answer.”

  “In that case,” said the Lieutenant, “I’ll answer it. I think I began planning it the day my father and two brothers didn’t come back after some soldiers dropped by one midnight. I was thirteen at the time; I’m twenty-seven now. There isn’t anything I’ve done that wasn’t part of it—getting into the Service, qualifying for the Concentric Guard—everything. I have never married. I never learned to dance. Tonight it all came to a peak and you took it away from me. Now you know what I am and what I’ve done and how I feel.”

  Dr. McHenry leaned back in his chair and delivered an unprofessorial “Wow.” His wife—it was almost ludicrous—said with what sounded like genuine concern, “You’re sure I can’t get you something?” The girl looked very sober. Dr. McHenry slid the drawer open and took out another yellow sheet. He glanced at it and said, “How much do you know about Leader Dorne? I mean who his folks were, how he grew up, all the things that made him what he is?”

  “I’ve read the school books. Who hasn’t? Visions as a child, flabbergasting his teachers, arguing down the professors when he was twelve—all that. I never bothered much with it. All I cared about was him now—his habits, his routines, where I could get at him.”

  “Then let me tell you some things you may not know.

  “Dorne was born a Jew. His parents weren’t Jewish; they converted just before he was born. They were hardshell Fundamentalists who wanted to go all the way into the Old Testament because they found the new one not orthodox enough for them. When Dorne got old enough to think for himself he shucked all that and became a Christian. Somewhere in his teens he was a Buddhist for a while, but that didn’t last; there’s not much in real Buddhism for a man who wants personal power. After that he turned away from religion altogether and got involved with communism. Very involved. It didn’t take him long to become part of the inner circle.

  “That lasted for quite a few years, and then the currents began to flow in the other direction. Dorne joined the opposition, turned in a lot of his friends, and before long was masterminding the so-called Swing to the Right of the 1990s. It wasn’t a big step to turn that into what we have today.”

  “And we’ll have it forever, thanks to you and your Mark VII.”

  Again McHenry held up the pacifying hand. “It’s very important—vital—for you to understand what we’re trying to tell you. Just remember what I’ve said about the Leader. I want you to notice especially the timing of the changes he went through. At first it was a matter of weeks, then months, then years.”

  “And now,” said the Lieutenant glumly, “there’ll never be another. He’s too old to change.”

  “Very good. Very good,” said Dr. McHenry with surprising warmth. “The very point I wanted to get across. Now: Rachel.”

  She came closer and perched on the arm of one of the big chairs; she looked like a plump bird. He was marveling again at the very idea that this legendary figure should think of making coffee for him when she dropped her bomb: “Lieutenant, I’ve found out how to make a man immortal.” She paused. “Truly. Barring accident, a man can live forever.”

  The Lieutenant closed his eyes carefully and opened them again to see again, really believe this plump friendly little lady who was saying things about DNA and RNA molecules. “Hard to do, mind you, but easy to understand. The pattern, the blueprint of the whole human being is in every single cell of his body. Now in a newborn baby, the patterns are sharp and clear, but as we grow older the lines of the blueprint get blurred as the cells are replaced. It’s just the same thing as making copies of a tape. You can get beautiful copies with good equipment, but no matter how good it is, when you have to make copies from copies, you lose a little each time. And that’s all aging is.

  “But if you have the original tape, and make each copy from that one, you can get a great number of almost perfect copies. Likewise if you have a tissue sample of a newborn baby, and keep it for, say, forty years, you can use it as a master to clean up the blurred lines in that same person’s DNA molecules. It’s done through the lymph system—flooding the tissues … Oh, but never mind that, we don’t have to get technical. Will you believe me if I say we can do it?”

  “I’ll believe you.” He had to say it.

  McHenry opened his drawer again and took out a yellow sheet. This was beginning to irritate the Lieutenant. Dr. McHenry beckoned the girl, who crossed to him, glanced at the paper, and then came to the Lieutenant. She sank to her knees before him, took both his hands, looked deep into his eyes. Holding him so—and her eyes seemed to be doing most of the holding—she pressed his hands down on the arms of his chair. There was a faint click and he looked down to find his wrists, his forearms and his thighs encircled by bands of silvery-gray mesh which flicked up and around and down into the chair again. “It’s all right,” the girl said before he could speak, could shout. “Try to relax, now.” She stood up, moved away.

  The Lieutenant gazed disgustedly down at his trapped limbs. “And now it begins, I suppose.” He hoped his tone of disgust covered all of his terror.

  “Nothing begins,” said Dr. McHenry. “It’s just time to tell you something, and we don’t want you to get hurt.” He looked at his wife, who said quietly, “We have a preserved sample of Leader Dorne’s tissue, taken when he was only eight days old. We’ve been able to reconstitute the DNA from it, and prepare enough synthetic DNA to flood his whole body. We are going to make him into a perfectly self-perpetuating organism. We will make him immortal.”

  The Lieutenant yelled then, and leapt upward against the straps. And again. And again. He began to shout something with such force that the words could not be understood. Saliva flew; he bit his tongue; blood flew. The women ran to him, saying soothing nonsense words as to a hurt child, wiping his wet and bloody mouth. Rachel McHenry bathed his temples and eyelids with a tissue drenched in something cool and medicinal. At last he was calm enough to be able to use words, though he still shouted. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? You’ve killed us all, and all the people to come. Oh, the armies and factories and farms will keep on goin
g, and all the people in them, but they’ll be dead, all mankind will be dead because it can’t grow, it can’t change! Why didn’t you leave me alone? Why didn’t you let me kill him?” He sobbed; then he shouted again: “What’s in it for you? Haven’t you got enough medals and prizes already? What can Dorne do for you?” After that he began to curse. They let him. Dr. McHenry took another yellow sheet out of the drawer. When he looked at it, he smiled. He handed it to the girl, and the expressions which chased themselves over her face were a sight to see—surprise, laughter, and then an exquisite wave of pink. She returned to the chair and knelt before the prisoner, waiting. When he began to run down, she asked him gently, “Will you listen to me?” She had to repeat it before he could hear her; he slumped back and glared at her redly. She said patiently, “If I let you go, will you listen to me?”

  Still he stared, and she sighed and took from a pocket the leather-mounted I.D. she had displayed in the stone room the profile of the Leader flanked by the two S’s. “This isn’t a real one. We made it. Don’t you see, we’re not on Dorne’s side—we’re on yours. You and I, all of us here—we want the same thing; we want an end to what Dorne has built.” She threw the I.D. back over her shoulder, a used-up thing. He followed it with his eyes, and then looked angrily at her again. “Why should I believe you?”

  “Why did you believe I was in the SS? Just because I showed you that? What was I to do—explain all this to you, in the state you were in? Suppose I had—how far could I have gotten marching you out at gunpoint? They’d have caught us both, for sure. No, you had to leave by yourself, certain you were watched. The only thing that could make you do that was to believe the SS was on to you. Don’t you see—I had to do it this way?” She was pleading with him, and while fury and amazement circled around his confused mind, she reached up and removed the Dorne hat, and did something with pins, clips.… Her hair cascaded down around her shoulders and back and breasts, such masses of red-gold hair as he had seldom seen, never touched—never in his stark, unswerving, purposeful life. “May I let you go now? Will you listen? Will you please listen?”

  He nodded. Instantly she touched a control in the chair arm, and the restraints flickered out of sight. Rachel McHenry said, “I could maybe make you that cup of coffee now?” and somehow they all laughed—not heartily, just a little, but it cleared the air.

  McHenry came round his desk and crossed to the chair where the girl still knelt, like a nymph under a waterfall, a red-gold light-fall. He carried one of his yellow papers with him. He said, “Think, now—think hard. Remember what I told you about Dorne’s patterns. He moved from religion to religion, then into politics, from one kind to another. He was looking for answers, he was looking for some law, some system that would be right for him, and finally, when he couldn’t find one, he made one.

  “But it is the pattern of that man to change. True, the changes came more and more slowly as he grew older, and true, too, that with a normal lifetime he would die before the next change could come. If he dies now, there will be no change. He has computers too, you know—and he has programmed them. He will no longer be kingpin—his computer will run the whole structure, and then there will be death for us all. Life itself is growth and change, and a society which does not grow and change is dead, and all the people in it, as you yourself said.

  “Now we have given Dorne unlimited life, and because he is what he is, he will change this thing. Ultimately he will because he must—because he is Dorne and that is his pattern. Also, he has more power to bring about the changes than anyone else.

  “All this will happen if he is immortal. He can’t be immortal as long as you are alive and free and determined to kill him. Can you understand me?”

  The Lieutenant looked from one to another of them, and his eyes came to rest on the girl’s hair. Rachel McHenry murmured, “You have to find something else to live for.”

  The young man rose from his big chair and moved slowly toward the girl. Almost like a sleepwalker he raised his hand and gently touched her hair. The hand dropped away. He shook himself, then said to Rachel, “Maybe I could. Maybe I could, if …”

  No one finished the sentence for him, but the girl smiled.

  The Lieutenant put his hands to his face for a moment, then took them down, and now he could smile too, a little. “You’ve batted me around like a ping-pong ball,” he said a little shakily. “I’ve never felt so helpless in all my life. You people are out of my league.”

  “No we’re not.” Dr. McHenry smiled. “But our friend in the corner is.” He pointed at the battered desk—and why should a Mark VII XT not look like a battered desk? “Don’t give us more credit than we deserve. Look at this.”

  Words were typed on the yellow sheet: If killing Dorne is a conviction, keep him. If an obsession—kill him.

  “Convictions yield to reason,” McHenry said gently. “Obsessions don’t. It was a close thing.”

  The Lieutenant looked at that mass of red-gold and said, “Not really.” Nobody ever told him that the VII had instructed her to take it down, that it had followed every word spoken in that room. Nobody ever told him, either, because it never occurred to him to ask, why a pair of Fundamentalist parents would preserve every scrap of flesh cut away from themselves or their child; such folk believe they will be reassembled on Judgment day, actually and literally.

  So it was by this means that Mankind overpowered Death and conquered Time, and took the stars.

  Crate

  We had to bury the pilot and Mr. Petrilli and the Stein kid, and by the time we were done with that we had to bury Rodney. It was a hell of a job for a bunch of kids but Miss Morin made us. The pilot had no face and not much head and Mr. Petrilli’s chest was all squashed and the Stein kid didn’t seem to have a mark on him, I guess he died of scare before the boat hit. Rodney screamed until Miss Morin gave him that stuff. After that he just lay there until he died. Also Miss Morin was hurt but nobody knew it at the time. She was up and around before anybody, after the crash, telling everybody what to do. She was always a great one for that. You want to be a probation officer, you be like that. Miss Morin, she was a probation officer before she was born, I bet when she was born she had that same set of lines around her mouth old maids get from sucking their own mouth instead of someone else’s.

  After we planted the people we wanted to take it easy but she told off Fatty and Pam to drag out some food and set it up while Tommy and Hal and Flip had to get into the hold and bring out a crate. There was a lot of crates in there and most of them was triangles, full of panels for building dome houses, but it wasn’t just any crate she wanted, it was one special one. She give Tommy a paper with the special numbers wrote on it big, and they had to slide half a hundred crates in and out to look before they found the right one. They got it out and it was hard, with the ship tipped over that way and Flip getting under foot all the time. He was nine. Tom was fifteen, big. Hal was fourteen but not much bigger than Flip. The crate weighed about a hundred pounds.

  We sat on the ground outside and ate except Miss Morin.

  She sat on the crate. That’s the way she was, she always stood or sat a little higher than everyone else, one of her tricks. She was full of tricks. She was the most iron-handed hardmouthed cold-blooded old bitch ever lived. She was always around. She told us what to do and she was around to see it got done. There was other probation officers back on Earth had groups like us, overflow kids that didn’t fit in nowhere and got into trouble and they shipped them off to frontier planets where they could fight cold and heat and animals instead of other people and the “Great As Is” (well that was what they said they was doing, we always thought they was just finding some edge to dump us off); anyway, other probation officers made up stuff for their kids to do and then went off on their own and when they came back, if it wasn’t done they would put one or another of the kids in Detention or all of them. Miss Morin never did that, she was always around, she never went off on her own business, she had no business
but us. She didn’t use Detention, she didn’t need it, she was a walking Detention all by herself. Also the other Probation Officers rode herd on a group until they was shipped out and then got theirselves another bunch. Not Miss Morin. When the day came for us to go, there she was, she’d fixed it to come along too. Nobody knew for sure what it would be like Outside, the only thing to look forward to was being away from your PO, and look at this, we had our PO right along with us.

  So while we ate she made this speech. She said what we already knew, that there wasn’t no place for kids like us on Earth, we’d all had our chance to shape up and we didn’t, we were lucky to live in a time when there was frontier worlds where there could be a place for us, because in earlier times there wasn’t no place and we would of been calmed down by wiping out part of our brain and be fit to push a mop for life, and in a earlier time still we would of spent most of our time in like Detention but much worse, with bars on the windows. But now there was the Jump Drive and a way of space-bending, like if you put two dots on a paper a long way apart and then bend the paper so the dots are together, you could jump from one to the other without hardly moving, and in no time. So with the Jump Drive there was ships going to thirty or more brand-new worlds and more found all the time, with plenty of room for overflow people and plenty of work and room for the likes of us that was so much trouble. This here was one of the new worlds, it was called Barrault and it was a dangerous place but it could be a good one if we got it tamed down. And we did not have to do it ourself, there was already a town called Cap Sidney.

  Miss Morin went on to tell us more we already knew, like our boat crashed. Jump Drive ships don’t land no place, boats off them do. So when they turned our boat loose it come into Real Space in the middle of a magnetic storm and nothing worked right. The pilot done the best he could but without radio or radar or ground control he couldn’t do much. So he was dead and Mr. Petrilli and two of the kids, and that left Miss Morin and the five of us. The ship wouldn’t know we crashed, you don’t contact Jump Ships from Real Space because they ain’t in it. Also they wouldn’t know we’d crashed at Cap Sidney neither, they had no way of knowing when a boat would come unless they got told by the boat, which we didn’t do without no radio because of that storm.