Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Roan!”

  “Later,” he barked, already spinning the dial.

  “Please! Only a minute!”

  “I haven’t got a minute,” he snapped and stepped up on the platform. The flicker of blackness cut off her pleading.

  He stepped down from his arrival platform and stopped dead.

  No drapes! No perfume! No—oh, holy Private in Heaven!

  “Roan Walsh!” squeaked Corsonmay. The secretary’s eyeballs all but stood out on her dry cheekbones. Under them, her hands—decently gloved, thank the powers—were pressed, and in her hair obscenely hung a comb which, he deduced, he had interrupted in midstroke. He saw instantly what had happened, and a coruscation of fury and embarrassment spun dazzlingly inside him.

  She must have seen him throw away the number she had written down for him and supplied him with another. And he had had to go and assume that it was … oh, to expect the drapes, the arms, the—and all that—and to come face to face with this!

  “Private!” she shrilled. “Mam! Mam!” Calling her parents. Well, of course. Any decent girl would.

  He dived for the dialpost. So did she, but he got there first.

  “Don’t go, Roan Walsh,” she panted. “Corsonmam and my father, they’re not here, they would have been if only I’d known, they’ll be back soon, so please don’t go.”

  “Look,” he said. “I found the number on my desk and I thought Grig Labine had left it there. I was supposed to see him and I’m late now. I’m sorry I invaded your privacy, but it was a mistake, see? Just a mistake.”

  The eagerness faded from her almost-wrinkled face and homely hot eyes. She seemed to shrink two inches in a tenth of a second. Her mouth pouted, wet and pathetic, and quivering puckers appeared at its sides. Oh, you stinker, what did she ever do to you? he said to himself.

  “Be serene,” he blurted. He dialed his home.

  “Oh-h-h-h …” her wail was cut off by the transplat.

  He stood where he was, his eyes squeezed closed on his embarrassment, and breathed hard.

  And then he became aware of a whimpering “Please …” and, for one awful moment, thought Corsonmay’s transplat had not operated. He opened his eyes cautiously and then sighed and stepped down. He was home. It was Valerie who was whimpering.

  “Well, what’s the matter with you?” he asked.

  “Roan,” she wept, “please don’t be angry with me. I know I was a beast. It was just—oh, I meant it, but I didn’t have to be so …”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When you called about wanting me to go to Granny’s.”

  That seemed so long ago and so completely trivial. “Forget it, Val. You were absolutely right. I went, so forget it.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  “Of course I’m not.”

  “Well, I’m glad, because I want to talk to you. Can I?” she begged.

  This was unusual. “What about?”

  “Can we go out, Roan?”

  “Where are the parents?”

  “In the Family Room. We can be right back. Please, Roan,” she pleaded.

  He yielded. In his cosmos, Val was merely a perennial and harmless irritation; this was probably the first time he had consciously realized that she might be a person, too, with personal problems.

  “Grosvenor Center?” he asked.

  She nodded. He dialed it and stepped up on the platform and down again at Grosvenor. It was still daylight there and he wondered vaguely where on Earth it might be. The sea on one side was an evening blue, the moutaintop a glory.

  Val appeared on the transplat and stepped down. They walked silently past the decorator and the Fad and Fashion and the restaurant until they reached the park. They sat down side by side on a bench, with its shoulder-high partitions between each seat, and looked at the fountain.

  She was very pale and her shoulders were moving under the cape, a complex motion that was partly stifled sobs and partly the kneading of hands.

  He said, as gently as he could, “What’s up?”

  “You don’t like me.”

  “Aw, sure I do. You’re all right.”

  “No, please don’t like me. I don’t want you to. I came to you because you don’t like me.”

  This was completely incomprehensible to Roan. He decided that listening might extract more data than talking.

  Valerie said in a low voice, “I’ve got to tell you something that would make you hate me if you didn’t already, so that’s why. Oh, Roan, I’m no good!”

  He opened his mouth to deny this, but closed it silently. He had the wit not to agree with her, either.

  “There’s somebody I—saw. I have to see him again, talk with him. He’s—I want—Oh!” she cried, and burst into tears.

  Roan fumbled for a clean handkerchief and passed it deftly around the front of the partition, down low. He felt it taken from his fingers.

  “A May’s supposed to wait,” she said brokenly, “and one day her Private will come looking for her, and he will be her Private, and she will be his help and service until the end. But I don’t want to be help and service to the Private who comes. Who knows, one might come any minute. I want this one to come!”

  “Maybe he will,” soothed Roan. “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know!” she said in agony. “I only saw him. Roan, you have to find him for me.”

  “Well, where—”

  “He’s tall, as tall as you,” she said hurriedly. “His eyes are green. He has—” she gulped and her voice sank—“long hair, only not like a May. And right on the bottom of his chin there’s a little cleft and on one side—yes, on the left side—there’s a little curl of a scar.”

  “Hair? Men don’t have long hair!”

  “This one has.”

  “Now look,” he said, suppressing his laughter at the outlandish concept. “If there were such a man, long hair and all, everybody’d know where he is.”

  “Yes,” she said miserably.

  “So there you are. There’s no such man.”

  “But there is! I saw him!”

  “Where?” She was silent. He said impatiently, “If you don’t tell me where, how can I find him?”

  “I can’t tell you,” she said at last, painfully. “It doesn’t matter—you’d never find him—there.” She colored. “He must be somewhere else, too. Please find him, Roan. His name. Where he is. Even if he never—I’d like to know what his name is,” she finished wistfully. She stood up. “The Private will miss us.”

  On the way back to the transplat, she said to the air straight in front of her, “You think I’m just awful, don’t you?”

  “No!” he said warmly. “Sometimes I think everyone’s just a little different from what the Stasis expects. It isn’t ‘awful’ to be a little different.” And his subconscious, instead of objecting, dropped its prim jaw in astonishment.

  V

  The Family Room was the heart of their house, as such rooms were to every house on Earth. A chair—virtually a throne—dominated one wall. It held the video controls and the audio beams which came to audible focus in their proper places in the room—the miniature of the throne at the right wall, which was the place of the son of the house; the wooden bench at the left, which was the daughter’s; and the small stool at the throne’s foot, where the mother sat.

  The room, because of its beams and its padded floor and acoustically dead walls and ceiling, was a silent one and it was the custom for each family to convene there for two hours at the end of the day. There were stylized prayers, such reading as the Private chose, whatever conversation he dictated and, when he was so moved, transmitted entertainment of his choice for the clan.

  When Roan and Valerie entered, the original silence was compounded by towering disapproval. The Private’s hand lay on the video control, which he had just switched off. The Mam’s head had bobbed once, sidewise, so engrossed had she been in the program; it was as if a prop had been snatched away.

  Son and
daughter separated and went to their places. Roan felt the old hovering terror as the Private’s gaze flicked across his withers like a rowel. He sat down and glanced quickly at his sister. She huddled on her bench so oppressed, so indrawn, that even her wrinkle-free, foldless garments could not conceal her crushed look. Roan, with hands properly folded, swallowed apprehensively.

  “Late,” said the Private. “Both of you. This sort of thing can hardly help in my recommendations, Valerie, you unwanted creature.” This was an idiom used in chastising all Mays and passed Valerie by. Then, to Roan, “One would assume that my generosity and forgiveness”—that would be a hint about the partnership—“would result in at least a minimal effort not to repeat the offense. You are thirty years of age—old enough to know the difference between Stasis and chaos. You will be confined, by my personal lock, to your cubicle for forty-eight hours, where you may reflect on the consequences of disorganization. Valerie!”

  She twitched and gave the proper response, which was to meet his eyes. Roan said nothing. In such occasions, there was no appeal.

  “Valerie, were you and your brother together in whatever escapade it was that led you to flout the organization of this house?”

  “Yes, Private, but it was really my—”

  “Then you must bear the same punishment—not primarily for being tardy, which is not one of your habitual defects, but for your failure to use your influence on your irresponsible sibling. I assume you failed to try, since it would be too painful for me to conclude that both my offspring lacked the basic elements of decency.”

  Another massive silence followed. The mother, sitting at his feet, rolled her eyes upward to the cushions, where his gloved hand lay. With a slight, unconscious movement, her ear sought the focal point of the currently nonexistent audio beam. The Private’s beard bulged as he dropped his glare upon her.

  “And since I must cling to a single shred of satisfaction,” he said, “let it be my faith in your knowledge of correct behavior, Mam. Assuming that this knowledge exists, the circumstance clearly indicates that you too have not properly applied it. There will therefore be no video for you tonight.” He unleashed a semi-circular glare in which his beard smote across their presences like the back of a hand. “Leave me.”

  They rose and shuffled out. The panel slid shut behind them. “I’m sorry.” Val barely breathed the apology.

  “Silence!” roared the grille over the door.

  They hung their heads and waited. Walshmam tiptoed away and returned in a moment with two small cubes. She led Valerie to her cubicle and stood aside. Valerie glanced once at Roan, who twitched a dismal smile at her. Then the panel slid shut on her and Walshmam pressed one of the cubes into its socket, effectively sealing the door until removed again from this side. True to custom, Roan waited until she passed him and then shuffled along behind her to his own cubicle.

  “And furthermore,” enounced the grille over the door, “I herewith refuse to consider the merits of the suggestion you made this morning. For, if good, it issues from an unworthy source and is tainted—if bad, it deserves no consideration.”

  Walshmam seemed very sad, but then few Mams were anything else. Their lives alternated between silent patience and silent regret, with only an occasional flicker of preventive action. He grimaced in an effort to convey a certain camaraderie, but she misunderstood and looked away, and he knew she had taken it as a rebellious or unrepentant expression.

  He wondered, as he dropped the dressing shield over his head, what would happen if he got up and hauled on the Private’s beard.

  Reaching for his brief nightshirt and sleeping shorts and bedshoes, he told himself, “I bet he hasn’t even got anything in his rule-book to cover that. And he never was so good with a new idea.”

  That reminded him of what Granny had said—the Private “never did understand how anything works. He just rides it.” He sure rides his family, Roan thought.

  So he himself would be a Private some day, have a family and get it all back again, he thought sleepily, and let himself sink down and down into a place where he sat on a monstrous throne with a beard to his knees, and watched his father, who sat on the boy’s chair, weeping. At his feet was—well, for heaven’s sake, it was Granny!

  At some point, it must have turned into a nightmare—a dreadful fragment involving being lost in the flicker of final black that one experienced on the transplat. Here, however, he was immersed in it, with dimensionless space at his freezing back and the unyielding “inner” surface of reality pressing into his face. He cried out and struggled—and thumped his cheekbone on solid rock. He yelped and pressed away from the rock and sat up.

  Not an inch from his head was the lintel of a shimmering, rectangular rock. Beyond it, a pale, green, alien sky which brightened by the moment.

  He glanced behind him and saw nothing but purple plain, cracked and crevassed, from which cactuslike spears sprouted grotesquely.

  He stepped through the doorway and, a few yards beyond, the desolation abruptly ended. Before him stretched rolling parkland, then a curving line of trees following a brook. Across the brook were fields—one brown, one tan, one a tender green—and they seemed, at this distance, as smooth as the surface of a cup of milk. To the right were mountains, one with a flaming cap so brilliant, his eyes stung. He recognized it as dawnlight on snow. To the left was a broad rolling valley. The air was warm but sparkling-fresh.

  He paused and inhaled deeply, seeking comprehension, then saw, to his right, a boulder as big as a Private chair. On the boulder sat a girl with golden hair and strange eyes. She wore a belted singlet that revealed far more girl than Roan had ever seen before. She held one delicately bronzed, bare knee in both hands. Her bare feet acknowledged the snowfire pinkly, and they were wet with dew.

  She laughed a greeting and rose and flowed over to him. “Come along,” she said.

  He clutched himself and hid his naked hands. With a swift, strong movement, she had his hands in hers.

  “Up we go,” she sang and, before he could think, she was leading him.

  His cheek touched her bare shoulder. He smelled her perfume and her sweet breath, and his eyes rolled up and his knees sagged. Her arm went briefly round his shoulders and she laughed again.

  “It’s all right, it’s only a dream,” she told him.

  “A dre—” he coughed—“eam?”

  “Thirsty?” She held out her hand, and he started violently when a cup appeared in it. “Here you are.”

  He took it, hesitated, then raised it. She still stood, smiling at him. Modestly he turned his back and drank. It was bright orange, cold, sweet-acid and delicious. He patted his lips carefully and turned back, waving the cup helplessly.

  “Throw it,” she said.

  “Th—what?”

  She gestured. Obediently, he tossed the cup straight up. It vanished.

  “Feel better? Come on, they’re all waiting for you.”

  Gaping up at the spot into which the cup had vanished, Roan said, “I want to go home.”

  “You can’t. Not until the dream’s finished.”

  He put his arms straight down and fluttered his hands until the cuffs concealed them. “I want to go home,” he said forlornly.

  “Why?”

  “I just …” He looked longingly over his shoulder at the doorway. When he looked back, she was gone. And suddenly, urgently, he wanted her back. He took a step forward.

  “Boo!” she said, her lips just touching the nape of his neck. He whirled, and there she stood. “Where were you?”

  “Here—anywhere.” She vanished and reappeared instantly at his right.

  “Please,” he said, “don’t do that any more. And just let me stand here quietly for a minute.”

  “All right.” She wandered away, picked a snowdrop and a strange green-and-purple flower, added a fern-frond and came back toward him, her fingers deft and a-dance. She held out the flowers, woven into a tiny circular wreath, and spun them on her finger. Then
she set them into her golden hair.

  “Pretty?”

  “Yes.” His eyes fell away from her and were dragged back again. “Why don’t you cover your arms?” he blurted.

  “We wear what we please here.”

  “Where is here?”

  “Sort of another world.” He glanced back at the gateway. “It wouldn’t do any good,” she explained. “There isn’t anything in there now but blackness. The way out is a time, not a place. Don’t be afraid. You’ll go back when it’s time.”

  “When?”

  “How long did you have to sleep?”

  “Forty-eight hours, though I’d never—”

  “Maybe you can stay that long. Who’s to know?”

  “You’re—sure I’ll get back in time?”

  “Sure as sure. Is it all right now?”

  Shyly, he smiled. “Fine. Everything’s fine.”

  She took his hand, and skipped two paces, so he had to follow. He tried politely to tug his hand free, but she held fast and seemed not to notice. A giggle, a blush, the slightest sign of self-consciousness in her, and he would have found the contact unbearable.

  But she was so completely at ease that the revulsion would not come, and she chattered so gaily, making him answer, keeping him busy, that, even had he felt like asking her to let go, he had no space for the words, nor the words with which to do it.

  “You were in my cubicle,” he said breathlessly, as she hurried him down the slope.

  “Oh, yes—more than you know. I watch you sleep. You sleep nicely. There’s a tanager.” She stopped, balancing, something flowing out of her shining face to the blazing bird and back again. “I came to see you at your office, too. Everything’s straight and hard there, and sort of lonely. But all you people are lonely.”

  “We’re not!”

  “You wait until the dream’s finished and you won’t say that. Want to see a magic?” She stooped, still walking, and brushed her long fingers across a thick growth of tiny spiked leaves. They all closed up like little green fists.

  “Why’d you come?” he asked.