Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  I said, “Yes, Grantham.”

  “You don’t forget it, standing in her white dress with blue spots, rooted and spreading and stretched, whispering in the wind. Chip?”

  I answered again.

  “You know about the moth, Chip?”

  I said, “Pronuba yuccasella.”

  He grinned. It was good to see his face relax. “Good entomology, for a botanist.”

  “Not especially,” I said. “Pronuba’s a fairly botanical sort of bug.”

  “Mmm.” He nodded. “It doesn’t eat anything but yucca nectar, and the yucca blossom can be fertilized by no other insect. Chip, did you know a termite can’t digest cellulose?”

  “Out of my line.”

  “Well, it can’t,” said Grantham. “But there’s a bacterium lives in his belly that can. And what he excretes, the termite feeds on.”

  “Symbiosis,” I said.

  “Wonder how you’d get along,” he mused, “with folks who didn’t know as much as you do? Yes, symbiosis. Two living things as dissimilar as a yucca and a moth, and neither can live without the other.”

  “Like Republicans and Dem—”

  “Ah, stow it, cork it, and shove it,” Grantham said bluntly. He looked at the western hills, and the light put blood on his great lion’s head. “Pretty natural thing, that symbiosis. Lot of it around.”

  He began to talk again, rapidly, with, now and again, a quick glance at the darkling west. “Six months, seven, maybe, I collected around here. No trouble with Miguel. He collected a bunch of weeds and sticks, but once in a while he earned his keep, retroactively. The old lady kept her hands off. The kid spent every day with me. I guess I had the area pretty well sieved in four months, but I went out every day anyhow.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, I didn’t send so many specimens. Later, none. I know. I said I was sor—”

  For the first time I barked at him. “Go on with your story.”

  “Where—oh. The moth. The moth that won’t go near anything but a yucca.”

  I thought he had forgotten me. “Hey,” I said.

  “She danced,” he said, examining his hands carefully in the dim light, “any time it occurred to her, for a long time or a little. Or at night. At night,” he said clearly, heaving himself upright and not looking at me, “the petals open and the moths fly. They were a cloud around her head.”

  I waited. He said, “It’s only the truth. And once in the late sunset, still some light, and me close to her, I saw a moth crawl into her ear. I got scared, I—put out my hand to do something, pluck it out, shake her, do something. She didn’t exactly push me away. She looked up at me and raised her hand, slowly—or it seemed to be slowly, but it was there before my hand was. She just stood, still as a tree, waiting, and the moth came out again.”

  I didn’t say anything. Not anything at all. We sat watching the western mountains.

  “I went away,” said Grantham, his words stark and clear against the heat inside him. “To get more specimens, you understand.”

  “Some more came,” I said.

  “I was away for three months. A long time. Too long. Then I had no business back in Kofa but I went back anyway—oh, in case I’d left anything there or something. I was supposed to go back to the Institute, I guess. Mm.

  “The first face I saw in Kofa that I knew was Miguel’s. I fell over him. He was standing like a brown statue on the duckboards near the saloon and I tripped and knocked his hat off. I pulled him to his feet and asked him Com’ esta?

  “Malo, muy malo and a flood of north-Mex is all I could get. I guess I looked a little foolish. Why is it when you talk to someone who doesn’t know your language, you holler at him? Finally I got impatient and ran him into the bar. I asked Big Horn what Miguel was trying to tell me.

  “The general idea was that the little ones had died. I never did find out how many, two or three. Miguel shrugged at this, took off his hat, raised his eyes and his eyebrows, in that order, at the ceiling. I gather he felt no responsibility over this; such matters were out of his hands, but one could always make more. What bothered Miguel, Big Horn told me, was the loss of his wife, who had broken her leg, gotten a bone infection, and died muy rapido. She had been, it seemed, a very hard worker.

  “The girl? He didn’t know. He didn’t know any more after I got excited and tried to shake it out of him. Big Horn was over the bar with his bung-starter before I could pull myself together. He never minded anybody getting rough at his bar providing both parties were enjoying it. He pointed out to me that Miguel had come in here peaceably even if I hadn’t. Then he sat Miguel down and questioned him quietly while I fumed, and then he told Miguel to go, which he did much faster than usual.

  “ ‘He says,’ Big Horn told me, ‘that the girl just wandered away. He says she always spent more nights out in the yucca forest than home anyhow. She went away and she just didn’t come back. He says he went looking for her, too, after the old lady died. I guess he wanted his tortillas pounded. He looked real hard.’

  “I told him thanks, and came out here. I wish you had the makings, Chip.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I came out here and wandered for a while. A man can eat out here, sleep out here, right time of year. You could, Chip, knowing it just from books. I guess I felt real bad. Funny thing,” he mused. “I wanted to call her, but I had never found out what her name was.”

  He was quiet. The evening breeze sprang and died, stopped and pressed and sprang again. The yuccas whispered and whispered.

  “Hear?”

  “I hear,” I said.

  “I heard it one night, sleeping here, and came up standing. There was no wind. She was here, right here, Chip. Dancing like a yucca, whispering.”

  “See her?”

  “No, I didn’t see her.” I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was smiling, and I wondered what in time he was smiling about.

  “You, Professor, you want something more than you want anything else there is, more than money or your name in books or a woman. You want that Pudley Chair in Botany. I bet you’d kill anyone who tried to get it away from you.”

  “Anyone but you.”

  His fringed shirt rustled as he twisted toward me. “You mean that. You do mean that. That’s fine, Chip. That’s nice.” He rested his chin on his knees and paid attention to the evening star. “Everybody wants some one single thing that bad. Some get it, some don’t. Some know what it is, some never find out. You found out. I found out.”

  “Want to tell me?”

  “Sure I do. Sure. Chip, no offense, but you and I are different kinds of botanist.”

  “I know that. But—well, go on.”

  “You want botany out of books. Some window boxes, some lab, sure. You learned it right; there’s not a thing wrong in being that way, you see? Very valuable. You learned botany so’s you could be a botanist, the best damn botanist in the world, if you could make it. You might make it, too.”

  “And you?”

  “I got to be a botanist so I could be—close to something. Something like that symbiosis you were talking about. I’m a man, but man and cloverleaf, man and Chaya, man and piñon juniper—is that so much crazier than moth and cactus?”

  I said nothing. I try to form my spoken opinions from some sort of precedent.

  “Heard a story once about a man went away to a river island to carve statues. He carved statues for fourteen years and stashed ’em all in a big barn, dozens of ’em. When he figured his time was up, he dynamited the barn. Was he crazy?”

  “Out of my field,” I said briefly.

  “I think I know why he did it. Other sculptors wanted to get close to people—moneywise, socialwise, what have you—and used sculpture to do it. This fellow, he just wanted to get close to sculpturing. Maybe people mattered to him, but sculpture mattered more. Now do you see?”

  “You’re trying to tell me that you want to go on with botany by yourself—no texts, no classes,
no references.”

  He waved a hand; I saw it pass against the dark skyline. “Texts and references all here, Chip. Just not strained through a book first, that’s all.”

  I said, “Then no reports, no books written, no articles in the Journal.”

  “That’s right. This is for me.”

  “Selfish, isn’t it?”

  He said, very gently, “Not after eleven years in the Pudley Chair.”

  I understood that, and had nothing to say. Instead I asked him, “How close do you think you can carry this symbiosis of yours? Or was it just a figure of speech?”

  “Time to show you, I reckon,” he said. He rose. I followed.

  “It’s dark.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I know the way. Hook on to the back of my belt.”

  I did, and he strode off purposefully into the pitch-black shadows of the yucca. How we turned, climbed, slithered, I couldn’t say. It might have been a long way, and it might have been a circle.

  We stopped. He fumbled in his pouch. “It’s her birthday.”

  “How do you know?” I whispered. This was a place to whisper.

  “Just know. Pick a day, stay with it from then on. Amounts to the same thing. Here.”

  He put something into my hand. Cloth, very fine cloth. Layers, lace. Hard knob one end, two sticks other end …

  “A doll.”

  “Yup,” he said. “Purtiest one I ever saw.” He took it away from me. “Chip, hush now. Wait till the wind dies.”

  I waited in the whispering dark. The breeze was fitful, careless. It would drop to almost nothing, until all the other breathings and stirrings could be heard, and then giggle on up to be a breeze again. Suddenly, then, it was gone. From before us, in the pitch blackness, a yucca whispered.

  “There she is,” Grantham murmured. He stepped forward, and an unreasoning terror sent cold sweat oozing in my armpits. I stepped after him. He was leaning forward, apparently putting the doll into the lower swords of a young yucca.

  Something touched my face and I bit my tongue. Then I realized that Grantham’s heavy hand had tilted the plant toward us. Without conscious motivation I reached up swiftly and closed my hand on a flower. Without conscious reasoning I was exquisitely careful to twist it free without a sound or a detectible motion. I slipped it into my side pocket.

  “ ’Bye, baby.” He stood up and nudged me. “Let’s go.”

  If anything, the way back was longer. I stumbled along behind him, wondering if he were sane enough to write that resignation coherently. When we reached the trail a loom of silver was staining the eastern sky. “Easy going now,” was all he said.

  We trudged into the rising moon. I was deeply disturbed, but Grantham was calm and apparently deeply content.

  The yuccas thinned, and we started up the valley’s throat. Abruptly Grantham grunted and stopped.

  “What is it?”

  Silently he pointed. Fifty feet up the slope something wavered and flickered in the moonlight. “Bless her heart,” he said. “Come on, Chip.”

  He struck off toward whatever it was, and I followed him, walking on the balls of my feet, my eyes too wide, so that they hurt.

  When I caught up with him he stopped, turned to me, and drew his knife. “Symbiosis, Chip.”

  I don’t think he could see my face. I wouldn’t want to.

  He dropped to one knee and I leapt backward, stood spraddled, gasping. I watched him digging carefully in the ground, while over and around him fluttered a silent cloud of small white moths. They were not yucca moths. I know they weren’t because yucca moths never, never cluster near the ground. I mean, moths that cluster that way are not yucca moths, they aren’t, they were not, they couldn’t be.

  Look it up if you don’t believe it.

  Grantham grunted, pulled, and up out of the ground came an object that looked like a large parsnip. “Ever see one of these in the flesh, Chip?”

  Gingerly, I took it, squinted at it in the brightening moonlight. It was like a tuber, spineless, and with the upper end rounded and ribbed. I slipped my fingers along the grooves between the ribs and felt the small round protuberances.

  “Lophophora,” I said. My voice sounded odd to me. “I don’t know which one.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He trimmed off the grooved part and dropped it into his satchel. “Long as it’s peyotl, who’s quibbling?”

  Back on the trail, I swallowed hard and asked, “That’s symbiosis? You leave a doll on a yucca, and moths find peyotl for you?”

  He laughed his big laugh. “You can’t see further than your nose,” he said gaily and insultingly, “let alone as far as your front teeth.”

  “If you’ll explain,” I said stiffly, “I shall listen.”

  “The doll’s a symbol,” he said, suddenly deeply serious. “It represents something as vital as cellulose to a bacterium, or bacterial products to a termite. I didn’t need the doll itself, except it was her birthday. Long as I bring what she needs—and I do.”

  “And it—she—I mean, you get peyotl out of it,” I floundered. “That’s no symbol. That’s cash money.”

  “It is? What do I do with the money? Well, what?”

  “Grubstake,” I mumbled, frightened by his intensity.

  “I sell it for just what I need, no more,” he said. “And with it I stay out here and”—he chuckled—“study my references.”

  At the saloon Grantham wrote his resignation, and I was glad to see that it was written exactly as the old Grantham would have done it. I tucked it away safely. We dined heartily and slept in the same room back of the bar, and in the morning he helped me buy a horse. It was, therefore, not until I was out on the hot sand again that I had a chance to study my specimen.

  I felt very good that morning. I was, of course, sorry for poor mad Grantham. On the other hand—what was the little white moth that clustered over peyotl at night? Not the yucca moth, surely. Surely not.

  I wondered what had happened to that strange, pathetic little girl. Wandered out in her blue polka-dot dress to die among the yuccas, no doubt.

  I studied the wilted flower as I rode. Poor Grantham! This was enough to tip any trained botanist over the edge—this freak, sport, mutant yucca. Who ever heard of a white yucca flower with a large blue patch on each petal?

  I closed my eyes and smiled, seeing through the red heat-haze of my lids the cool shadowed library, turning the clop-clop of my horse into the delicate music of teacups on saucers.

  The Golden Helix

  TOD AWOKE FIRST, probably because he was so curious, so deeply alive; perhaps because he was (or had been) seventeen. He fought back, but the manipulators would not be denied. They bent and flexed his arms and legs, squeezed his chest, patted and rasped and abraded him. His joints creaked, his sluggish blood clung sleepily to the walls of his veins, reluctant to move after so long.

  He gasped and shouted as needles of cold played over his body, gasped again and screamed when his skin sensitized and the tingling intensified to a scald. Then he fainted, and probably slept, for he easily reawoke when someone else started screaming.

  He felt weak and ravenous, but extraordinarily well rested. His first conscious realization was that the manipulators had withdrawn from his body, as had the needles from the back of his neck. He put a shaky hand back there and felt the traces of spot-tape, already half-fused with his healing flesh.

  He listened comfortably to this new screaming, satisfied that it was not his own. He let his eyes open, and a great wonder came over him when he saw that the lid of his Coffin stood open.

  He clawed upward, sat a moment to fight a vicious swirl of vertigo, vanquished it, and hung his chin on the edge of the Coffin.

  The screaming came from April’s Coffin. It was open too. Since the two massive boxes touched and their hinges were on opposite sides, he could look down at her. The manipulators were at work on the girl’s body, working with competent violence. She seemed to be caught up in some frightful nightmare, lying on h
er back, dreaming of riding a runaway bicycle with an off-center pedal sprocket and epicyclic hubs. And all the while her arms seemed to be flailing at a cloud of dream-hornets round her tossing head. The needle-cluster rode with her head, fanning out behind the nape like the mechanical extrapolation of an Elizabethan collar.

  Tod crawled to the end of his Coffin, stood up shakily, and grasped the horizontal bar set at chest level. He got an arm over it and snugged it close under his armpit. Half-suspended, he could then manage one of his feet over the edge, then the other, to the top step. He lowered himself until he sat on it, outside the Coffin at last, and slumped back to rest. When his furious lungs and battering heart calmed themselves, he went down the four steps one at a time, like an infant, on his buttocks.

  April’s screams stopped.

  Tod sat on the bottom step, jackknifed by fatigue, his feet on the metal floor, his knees in the hollows between his pectorals and his shoulders. Before him, on a low pedestal, was a cube with a round switch-disc on it. When he could, he inched a hand forward and let it fall on the disc. There was an explosive tinkle and the front panel of the cube disappeared, drifting slowly away as a fine glittering dust. He lifted his heavy hand and reached inside. He got one capsule, two, carried them to his lips. He rested, then took a beaker from the cube. It was three-quarters full of purple crystals. He bumped it on the steel floor. The beaker’s cover powdered and fell in, and the crystals were suddenly a liquid, effervescing violently. When it subsided, he drank it down. He belched explosively, and then his head cleared, his personal horizons expanded to include the other Coffins, the compartment walls, the ship itself and its mission.

  Out there somewhere—somewhere close, now—was Sirius and its captive planet, Terra Prime. Earth’s first major colony, Prime would one day flourish as Earth never had, for it would be a planned and tailored planet. Eight and a half light-years from Earth, Prime’s population was composed chiefly of Earth immigrants, living in pressure domes and slaving to alter the atmosphere of the planet to Earth normal. Periodically there must be an infusion of Earth blood to keep the strain as close as possible on both planets, for unless a faster-than-light drive could be developed, there could be no frequent interchange between the worlds. What took light eight years took humans half a lifetime. The solution was the Coffins—the marvelous machine in which a man could slip into a sleep which was more than sleep while still on Earth, and awaken years later in space, near his destination, subjectively only a month or so older. Without the Coffins there could be only divergence, possibly mutation. Humanity wanted to populate the stars—but with humanity.