Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  It was loosely woven, with a paradoxical texture, very rough, yet very soft.

  It fell on and around his hand and draped away like—like …

  “What is it? What’s this called?” he blurted.

  A woman next to him said, “They call it knitting.”

  III

  He skipped to the laFarge yards and Kimberley, Danbury Marble and Krasniak, checking inventories and consulting accountants. He did it all without notes, which he had left in his office when he charged out at noon. He did it efficiently and he did it, without at first knowing why or even how, in the most superb cross-spoor fashion, so that, by quitting time, it would take far more trouble than it was worth for the office to discover he had used the first two hours of the afternoon for his own purposes.

  This small dishonesty troubled him more than a little. Honor was part of the decency-privacy-perfection complex, and yet, to a degree, it seemed to be on the side of good business and high efficiency to operate without it. Did this mean that he was not and could not be what his father called a gentleman? If not, how much did it matter?

  He decided it didn’t matter, cursed silently and jovially at the inner voice which sneered at him, and went to see his grandmother.

  There was very little difference between one transplat court and another. A business might have a receptionist and homes might have a larger or smaller facility, but with the notable exception of the blonde’s apartment in his dream—surely it was a dream—when he first found walls covered with drapes, he had never noticed much difference between courts.

  Granny’s, however, always gave him a special feeling of awe. If it could be found anywhere on Earth, here, right here in this court, was the sum and symbol of their entire culture—neat, decent, correct.

  He stepped off the transplat and went to the dialpost to check the time, and was pleased. He could hardly have been any more punctual.

  There was a soft sound and a panel stood open. It was the same one as always and he wondered, as he had many times before, about the other rooms in Granny’s house. He would not have been surprised if they all proved to be empty. What could she need but her rectitude, her solitude and a single room?

  He entered and stood reverently. Granny, all ivory and white wax, made a slight motion with her hooded eyes and he sat opposite her. Between them was a low, bare table.

  “Great Mam,” he said formally, “good Stasis to you.”

  “Hi,” she said quaintly. “How you doing, boy?” For all his patient irritation with Granny, as always he felt the charm of her precise, archaic speech. Her voice was loud enough, clear enough, but always had the quality of a distant wind. “You look like you hoed a hard row.”

  Roan understood, but only because of many years of experience with her odd phrasing. “It’s not too bad. Business.”

  Tell me about it.” The old woman lived in some hazy, silent world of her own, separated incalculably in time and space from the here and now, and yet she never failed to ask this question.

  He said, “Just the usual … I’ve brought you something.” From the pocket under his cape, he took the decorations he had bought, twisted the tube which confined them and handed the explosion of roses and daffodils to her. The other package clattered to the table.

  There was the demure flash of a snowy glove and she had the stems. She put her face down into the fragrant mass and he heard her breath whisper. “That was very kind,” she said. “And what’s this?” She popped the wrapping and peeped down between the edge of the table and the hem of her cape to see. “Knitting! I didn’t know anyone remembered knitting. Used to be just the thing for the old folk, when I was a sprout like you. Sit in the sun and rock and knit, waiting for the end.”

  “I thought you’d like it.” He caught the slight movement of her shoulders and heard the snap of the wrappings as she closed the package again and slid it to the undershelf.

  They beamed at each other and she asked him, “Aren’t you working too hard? You look—well, you were going to tell me about the business.”

  He said, “It’s about the same. Oh, I had an idea this morning and told the Private about it. I think he’s going to use it. He was pleased. He talked about the partnership.”

  “That’s fine, boy. What was the idea?”

  She wouldn’t understand. But he told her anyway, choosing his words carefully, about his plan to eliminate the transplat operators. She nodded gravely as he spoke, and at one point he had a mad impulse to start making up nonsense technological terms out of his head, just to see if she’d keep nodding. She would; it was all the same to her. She was just being polite.

  He restrained himself and concluded, “So, if it works out, it will be a real economy. There just wouldn’t be any way for a shipment to go astray the way—” he almost blurted out the story of the arrival of the passenger van at the monastery, and caught himself just in time; the old lady would have been shocked to death—“the way some have in the past.”

  “I reckon they couldn’t,” she agreed, nodding as if she understood. He ought to return her courtesy, he thought, and said, “And what has occupied you, Great Mam?”

  “I do wish you’d keep calling me Granny,” she said, a shade of petulance creeping into the weary whisper. “What have I been doing? What might I be doing at my age? Know how old I am, Roan?”

  He nodded.

  “A hundred and eighty-three come spring,” she said, ignoring him. “I’ve seen a lot in my time. The stories I could tell you … Did you know I was born in the Africa Colony?”

  He nodded again, and again she ignored him. “Yes indeedy, I was about your age when all this started, when the transplat broke the bubble we lived in and scattered us all over the world.”

  Yes, you saw it happen! he thought, for the first time fully realizing something he had merely known statistically before. You saw folk dancing chest to chest and having food together and no one thinking a thing about it. You knew the culture before there was any real privacy or decency—you, who are the most private and decent of people today. The stories you could tell? Oh, yes—couldn’t you, though! What did they call them before they called them ‘flower shops’?

  Certain she couldn’t conceivably divine his motivations, he asked, “What did people do then, Granny? I mean—today, if you could name one single job all of us had to do, it would be keeping the perfection we have. Could you say that you folks had any one thing like that?”

  Her eyes lighted. Granny had the brightest eyes and the whitest, soundest teeth of anyone he knew. “Sure we had.” She closed her eyes. “Can’t say we thought much about perfection—not in the early days. I think the main job was the next step up.” “The next step up,” she repeated, savoring the phrase. “You know, Roan, what we have today—well, we’re the first people in human history that wasn’t working on that, one way or another. They’d ought to teach human history nowadays. Yes, they should. But I guess most folks wouldn’t like it. Anyway, folks always wanted to be a bit better in those days.

  “Sometimes they stopped dead a couple hundred years and tried to make their souls better, and sometimes they forgot all about their souls and went ahead gettin’ bigger and faster and tougher and noisier. Sometimes they were real wrong and sometimes they did right just by accident; but all the time they worked and worked on that next step up. Not now,” she finished abruptly.

  “Of course not. What would we do with a step up? What would we step up to?”

  She said, “Used to be when nobody believed you could stop progress. A grass seed can bust a piece of granite half in two, you know. So can a cup o’ water if you freeze it in the right place.”

  “We’re different,” he said smugly. “Maybe that’s the real difference between us and other kinds of life. We can stop.”

  “You can say that again.” He did not understand her inflection. Before he could wonder about it, she said, “What do you know about psi, Roan?”

  “Psi?” He had to search his mind. “Oh—I r
emember it. Fad and Fashion was selling it a couple of years ago. I thought it was pretty silly.”

  “That!” she said, with as much scorn as her fragile, distant-wind voice could carry. “That was a weejee-board. That thing’s older’n anyone knows about. It didn’t deserve the name of psi. Well, look here—for ten thousand years, there’ve been folks who believed that there was a whole world of powers of the mind—telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, clairvoyance, clairaudience … lots more. Never mind, I’m not going to give you a lecture,” she said, her eyes suddenly sparkling.

  He realized that he had essayed a yawn—just a small one—with his mouth closed, and that she had caught him at it. He flushed hotly. But she went right on.

  “All I’m saying is this—there’s plenty of proof of this power if you know where to look. One mind talks to another, a person moves in a blink from place to place without a transplat, a mind moves material things, someone knows in advance what’s going to happen—all this by mind power. Been going on for thousands of years. All that time, nobody understood it—and now nobody needs to. But it’s still around.”

  He wondered what all this had to do with the subject at hand. As if she had heard him wonder, she said, “Now you wanted to know what the next step up might be, in case anybody was interested. Well, that’s it.”

  “I can’t see that as a step upward,” he said, respectfully but positively. “We already do move things—speak over distances—all those things you mentioned. We even know what’s going to happen next. Everything is arranged that way. What good would it be?”

  “What good would it be to move the operators off the transplats?”

  “Oh, that’s an economy.”

  “What would you call it if telekinesis and teleportation moved goods and people without the transplat?”

  “Without the transplat?” he almost shouted. “But you—but we—”

  “We’d all be in the same boat with those operators you’re replacing.”

  “The op—I never thought about them!”

  She nodded.

  Shaken, he mused, “I wonder why the Private never thought of that when I told him about it this morning.”

  There was a dry, delighted sound from deep in the old chest. “He wouldn’t. He never did understand how anything works. He just rides it.”

  Roan controlled himself. One did not listen to criticism of one’s parents. But this was Great Mam herself. The effort for control helped bring the whole strange conversation into perspective and he laughed weakly. “Well, I hardly think we’re going to have any such—economy—as that.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “This progress we were talking about. You know, even in my time most folks had the idea that humans planned human progress. But when you come to think of it, the first human who walked upright didn’t do it because he wanted to. He did it because he already could.” When she saw no response on his face, she added, “What I mean is that if the old-timers were right and progress can’t be corked up, then it’s just going to bust loose. And if it busts loose, it’s going to do it whether you’re the head of J. & D. Walsh or a slag-mucker, whether you’re happy about it or not.”

  “Well, I don’t think it will happen.”

  “Haven’t you been listening to me? It’s always been with us.”

  “Then why didn’t they—why should it show up now and not a thousand years from now?”

  “We never stopped progressing before—not like this,” she said, with a sweeping glance at the walls and ceiling which clearly indicated the entire planet.

  “Granny, do you want this to happen? You?”

  “What I want doesn’t matter. There’ve always been people who had—powers. All I’m suggesting is that now, of all times, is the moment for them to develop—now that we don’t develop in any other way.”

  He was persistent. “You think it’s a good thing, then?”

  She hesitated. “Look at me, how old I am. Is that a good thing? It doesn’t matter—it happened—it had to happen.”

  “Why have you told me this?” he whispered.

  “Because you asked me what was occupying me,” she said, “and I figured to tell you, for a change. Frighten you?”

  Sheepishly, he nodded.

  She did, too, and laughed. “Do you good. In my day, we were frightened a whole lot. It took us a long way.”

  He shook his head. Do you good? He failed to see what good could come of any so-called “progress” that threatened the transplat. Why, what would happen to things? What would happen to their very way of life—to privacy itself, if anyone could—what was it, teleport?—teleport into a man’s office or cubicle …

  “Look, boy, you don’t have to wait until it’s your turn, to come chat with your old Granny, you know. Come over anytime you have something to talk about. Just let me know first, that’s all.”

  There was nothing in life he wanted less than another session like this one, but he remembered to thank her. “Byemam.”

  “Byeboy.”

  He rushed out to the dialpost and feverishly got the number of his home. He stepped up on the platform and the last he saw of Granny’s face through the open panel was her expression of—was it pity?

  Or perhaps compassion was a better name for it.

  IV

  He went straight to his cubicle, brushing past his sister as she stood at the edge of the court. He thought she was going to speak, but deliberately showed his back and quickened his stride. Her kind of smugness, her endless, placid recitations of her day’s occupations, were the prime thing he could do without at the moment. He needed privacy, lots of it, and right now.

  He leaned back against the panel when it closed. His head spun. It was a head which had the ability to thrust indigestible ideas into compartments, there to seal them off from one another until he had time to ruminate. This was how he was able to handle so many concurrent business affairs. It was also how he had been able to get through this extraordinary day—till then. But the compartments were full; nothing else must happen.

  He had awakened before daylight to see, in the soft glow of the walls, a girl in a flowing garment who regarded him gravely. Her hair had been golden and her hands were clasped over one knee. He had not been able to see her feet—not then.

  He had stepped on the ’plat to get to the office and had arrived, instead, in an unmentionable place containing drapes and this same girl. She had spoken to him.

  He had seen her again, perched on his desk.

  He had lost two hours in an unwonted self-examination, which had left him bewildered and unsure of himself, and had gone most respectably to see his most respectable grandmother, who had filled him full of the most frightening conjectures he had ever experienced—including the one which brought this mad business full circle. For she had suggested to him that, by a force called tele-something-or-other, certain people might appear just anywhere, transplat or no transplat.

  He snorted. You didn’t need a transplat to have a dream! He had dreamed the girl here and in the draped court. He had dreamed her in the office. “There!” he said to himself. “Feel better?”

  No.

  Anyone who had dreams like that had to be off his ’plat.

  All right: they weren’t dreams.

  In which case, Granny was right; someone had something so much better than a transplat that the world—his world—would come to an end. If only this were a technological development, it could be stopped, banned, to maintain the Stasis. But it wasn’t—it was some weird, illogical, uncontrollable mystery known to only certain people and he, Roan, wasn’t one of them.

  It was unthinkable, insupportable. Indecent!

  Going into his flower shop, he reached for his dinner ration. He grunted in surprise, for instead of the usual four tablets and tumbler of vitabroth, his hand fell on something hot, slightly greasy and fibrous. He lifted it, turned it over. It was like nothing edible he had ever seen before. On the other hand, there had been innovations from time to ti
me, as the Nutrient Service saw fit to allow for this or that change in the environment, the isolation of mutated bacteria and their antibiotics, the results of their perpetual inventory of sample basals.

  But this thing was far too big to be swallowed. Maybe, he thought suddenly, it was a combination of nutrients and roughage.

  His teeth sank readily into it. Hot, reddish juice dribbled down his chin and a flavor excruciatingly delectable filled his mouth and throat, his nostrils and, it seemed, his very eyes. It was so good, it made his jaw-hinges ache.

  He demolished the entire portion before it had a chance to get cold, then heaved a marveling sigh. He fumbled about the food-shelf in the vain hope of finding more—but that was all, except for the usual broth. He lifted the cup, then turned and carefully poured it down the sink. Nothing was going to wash that incredible flavor out of his mouth as long as he could help it.

  He slipped into his dressing shield and changed rapidly. As he transferred his wallet, he paused to glance into it to see if it needed replenishing.

  He grunted with the impact of memory. As he had left the Private’s office, he had come face to face with his—with that—well, dream or no, there she had been. And had disappeared. And on the corner of his desk, just where she had sat, had been the ’plat number—this number, here in his hand.

  Like the dream she was—wasn’t she?—the girl had not spoken to him here in his cubicle or in the office. But in the draped court she had. That episode, improbable as it seemed, could hardly have been a dream. He had dialed that transplat to get there. He might have misdialed, but he had been wide awake when he did it.

  She must be one of those—those next-step-upward monsters Granny was talking about, he decided. He had to know, had to speak to her again. Not because of her hair, of course, or the brazen garment. It was because of the transplat, because of the hard-won Stasis that held society together. It was a citizen’s simple duty to his higher pink toes. No, his higher self.

  He adjusted a fresh pair of gloves and strode out to the court. Valerie was still there, looking wistful.