Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

“Because you were ready to wonder.”

  “Wonder what?”

  She appeared not to consider this worth answering, but released his hand and bounded like a deer once, twice, then high over a brook. He floundered through it, soaking his bedshoes.

  When he caught up with her, she touched his chest.

  “Shh!”

  On the wind floated a note, then another note and, high and sweet, another, so that they became a chord. Then a note changed, and another, and another, and the chorus of voices modulated softly, like the aurora, which is the same as long as one looks, but changes if one looks away and back.

  “What’s your name?” he asked abruptly.

  “What would you like it to be?”

  “Flower!” he cried, the strange pressures of a dream asserting themselves; and with it he felt a liberation from the filth with which custom had clothed the word.

  “And you’re Roan, and a roan is a horse with wind in his mane and thunder in his feet, sweet-nostriled, wild-eyed, all courage and speed.”

  He thought it was a phrase from a song, yet it could have been speech—her speech. He squished the water in his muddy shoes and almost whinnied with delight at the thought of the thunder in his feet. She took his hand again and they leaped together to the brow of a foothill. Ahead, the song finished in a roar of good laughter.

  “Who is it?” he wanted to know.

  “You’ll see. There—there!”

  Where the hill shouldered into the forest was a clear, deep pool. In the forest and on the hillside, buildings nestled. Their walls were logs and their roofs were thatch. They were low and wide, and very much part of the hill and the woods. In the clearing between woods and slope, by the pool, was a great trestle table and, around the table, were the people who had been singing—you could tell by the sound of their laughter.

  “I can’t—I can’t!” Roan croaked miserably.

  “Why, what’s the matter?” asked Flower.

  “They have no decency!”

  “There are only two thing which are indecent—fear and excess—and you’ll see neither here. Look again.”

  “So many limbs,” he breathed. “And the colors—a green-and-red man, a blue woman …”

  “A blue dress and a harlequin suit. It’s grand to wear colors.”

  “There are some things one shouldn’t even dream.”

  “Oh no! There’s nothing you can’t dream. Come and see.”

  They went to see. They were made very welcome.

  VI

  At dusk, on the second day, Flower and Roan walked a shadowed aisle in the forest. Roan’s sleeping garments were tattered and seam-gutted, for he would not give them up, though they had not been designed for the brutality they had suffered. Yet he did not mind the rips and gapes, for no one else did. His bedshoes were long gone and he felt that if he were told he would never again feel the coolth of moss under his bare feet, or the tumble of brook-sand, he would die. He knew the Earth as something more than a place on which to float sealed cities. He had worked till he hurt, laughed till he cried, slept till he was healed. He had helped with a saw, with a stone, with a song. Wonder on wonder, and greatest wonder of all—the children.

  He had never seen any before. He did not know where children came from except that, when they were twelve, they went to their families from the crèches. He did not know how they were born. He did know that each child was educated specifically for a place in his Family and in the Stasis, and that the largest part of this education was a scrubbing and soaking and rubbing in of the presence of the father—his voice, features, manners of living and speaking and working. When the child emerged, there was a place for him in the home, by then very little different from his last place in the crèche, and he was fitted to it, not by the accidental authority of parentage, but through the full-time labors of a bank of specialists.

  Each family had one boy, one girl—one trade, one aim. This was how an economy could be balanced and kept balanced. This was how the community could raise its young and still maintain the family.

  But here, in this dream …

  Children babbled and sang and burned their fingers. They ran howling underfoot and swam like seals in the pool. They fought and, later, loved. They grieved, sweated, made their music and their mistakes. It was all very chaotic and perplexing and made for a strong, sane settlement which knew how to laugh and how to profit from an argument. It was barbarous and very beautiful.

  And it had a power—for these people quite casually did what Roan had seen Flower do. They seemed to have a built-in transplat and could send and receive from anywhere to anywhere. They could reach up into nothingness and take down bread or a hatchet or a book. They could stand silently for a time and then know what a wife would serve for nutrient—which they brazenly sat together to eat, though they went privately for other functions no more disgusting—or the tune of a new song or news of a find of berries.

  They seemed willing enough to tell him how all this was done, yet his questions got him nowhere. It was as if he needed a new language or perhaps a new way of thinking before he could absorb the simple essence. But for all their power, they had calluses on their hands. They burned wood as fuel and ate the yield of the land around them. To put it most simply, they made their bodies function at optimum because it made them joyful. They never let the psi factor turn, cancerlike, from a convenience to a luxury.

  So Roan walked quietly in the dusk, Flower at his side, thinking about these things and trying to shake them down into a shape he could contain. “But, of course, this isn’t real,” he said suddenly.

  “Just a dream,” nodded Flower.

  “I’ll wake.”

  “Very soon.” She laughed then and took his hands. Don’t look so mournful. We’re never very far away!”

  He couldn’t laugh with her. “I know, but I feel that this is—I can’t say it, Flower. I don’t know how!”

  “Then don’t try for now.”

  Before he knew it, his arms were around her. “Flower—please let me stay.”

  She stirred in his arms. “Don’t make me sad,” she whispered.

  “Why can’t I? Why?”

  “Because it’s your dream, not mine.”

  “I won’t let you go! I’ll hold onto you and I won’t wake up!” He staggered then and fell heavily. Flower stood calmly ten feet away.

  “Don’t make me sad,” she said again. “It hurts me to push you away like this.”

  He climbed slowly to his feet and held out his hand. “I won’t spoil any more of it,” he said huskily.

  They walked silently in the dimness, toward the shaft of light which the sun lay up the valley to the settlement each evening at this season.

  “How soon?” he asked, because he could not help himself.

  “When it’s time,” she said. She released his hand, put her arm through his and took his hand again. They came to the light.

  Roan looked slowly from one end of the clearing to the other, trying to see it as it had been to him at first, then as it was with the familiarity of two days. There was the kettle they used, they said, to make sugar from the maples, and he pretended he had seen it boil, seen the frantic dogs snapping the caramelized sweetmeat up from the snow and running in circles frantically until it melted and they could get their silly mouths open again. There was the buckwheat field which would carpet the spring snow with quick emerald on a warm day. There was the pond, there the ducks with old-ivory webs and mother-of-pearl lost in their necks. He saw—

  “There!” he yelled, and twisted away from Flower, to go racing across the clearing. “You!” he shouted. “You! Stop! You by the pool!”

  But the man did not turn. He was tall, as tall as Roan; his hair was very long, his eyes were green and, at the side of his cleft chin, was a curl of a scar. In the water, there was a chuckle of laughter, a flash of white.

  “You with the scar,” Roan gasped. “Your name—I’ve got to know your—”

  As the man tu
rned, Roan looked past his shoulder, down at the water, straight into the startled eyes of his sister Valerie.

  And that was the end of the dream.

  Only one good thing had happened since his mother had removed the block from his cubicle door. The cubicle itself had been the most depressing conceivable place to wake up in; its walls crushed him, its filtered air made him cough. It had no space, no windows. The dressing shield brought out a thudding in his temple and he hurled it to the floor, turning violently away from it, physically and mentally. He felt that if he itemized the symbolism of that tubular horror, he would go berserk and tear this coffin-culture apart corpse by corpse. Breakfast was an abhorrence. The clothes—well, he put them on, not daring to be angry about them, or he never would have gotten to the office.

  Corsonmay looked his way only long enough to identify, then stuck her silly flaccid face in a file-drawer until he was safely in his office. He looked at the desk, its efficient equipment, at the vise-jaws called walls and the descending heel called a ceiling, and he shook with anger. But he was weak with it when the heavy voice issued from the grille: “Step in here, Roan Walsh.”

  Trouble again. Out of the prison into the courtroom.

  He took four great breaths, three for composure, one a sigh. He went to the panel and it admitted him. His father sat back, his head and beard vying texture against texture. Before him was a scattering of field reports, and he looked as if he had nibbled the corner off one of them and found it unexpectedly good.

  “Good Stasis, Private.”

  The old man nodded curtly. “Your absence made it necessary for me to take up the threads of your work as well as my own. You will find what I have done on reports subsequent to yours.” He stacked the cards neatly and scattered them. “On reviewing these, I found to my surprise—my pleasant surprise, I may add in all fairness—that you have done a phenomenal amount of work. Kimberly, Krasniak, that warehouse tangle in Polska. And in spite of its speed, the work is good. I investigated it in detail.”

  This, thought Roan, sounded really bad. He put his hands behind him, lowered his chin in The Stance, and set his teeth.

  “The investigation brings out,” lumbered the vocal juggernaut, “that the work was done in roughly speaking four hours, three and one-half minutes. Very good. It seems, further, that the elapsed time involved was five hours, forty-eight minutes and some odd seconds. Approximately, that is.” He tapped the edges of the cards on the desk, flickered the lightning at Roan, then snapped forward and roared, “One hour and forty-five minutes seem to have disappeared here!”

  Roan wet his lips and croaked, “There was noonrest, Private.”

  The Private leaned back and stretched jovially. “Splendid, my efficient young scoundrel. Superb! And what is the noonrest permitted us at our present altitude in the organization?”

  “Forty minutes, Private.”

  “Good. Now all we have to account for is one hour and five minutes. Sixty-five precious, irredeemable minutes, which the resources of Stasis itself could not buy back. Over an hour unreported, yet somehow a double-time dock from your wages is not entered here. Or perhaps it is entered and, in my haste, I overlooked it.”

  “No, Private.”

  “Then either one or more transactions of company affairs were handled on that afternoon and not reported—which is gross inefficiency—or the time was spent on idling and personal indulgence, with every intention of accepting payment from the firm for this time—which is stealing.”

  Roan said nothing except to himself, and that was, almost detachedly, “I think I can stand about four minutes, thirty-two and three-tenths seconds—approximately—more of this.”

  “The picture is hardly a pleasant one,” said the Private conversationally, and smiled. “The records give me the choice of three courses of action. First, the time owed may be made up. Second, the value of these hours may be paid back. Third, I can turn you over to the Central Court with a full indictment, and thereby wash my hands of you. You might be given a bow and arrow and left to make your way in the wilderness between segments of Stasis. You could survive a long time with your training. Days. Weeks even.”

  “Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen …” Roan counted silently.

  “However, I am going to give you every opportunity to ameliorate this—this frightful crime. Take these cards into your office. You have between now and 1600—a punctual 1600, that is—in or out of the office, to revise any slight miscalculations you may have made and to refresh your memory in the event that you did useful work for the firm in any of these lost minutes. Every alteration you make, of course, will be checked to the tenth of a second. Until 1600—be serene.”

  Roan, quite numb, tottered forward, took the cards, muttered, “Byepry,” and awkwardly backed out.

  Why, he wondered, did he stand for it?

  Because there was no place to go, of course.

  There was …

  No, there wasn’t. That had been a dream.

  He sank into a black paralysis of rage.

  VII

  The phone roused him. He received, ready to tear the head off the caller, any caller. But it was Valerie.

  She said, “It’s nearly noonrest.” She would not meet his eyes. “Could you—would you mind …?”

  “Same place, right away?”

  “Oh, thank you, Roan!”

  He growled affectionately and broke off.

  She was not at the Grosvenor transplat when he got there, so he stalked straight to the park. She was waiting for him. He dropped down next to her and put his head in his hands—and damn the passers-by. Never seen a man’s hands before?

  He sat up after a while, however; Valerie’s silence positively radiated. He wondered if he should tell her about the man in the dream, and almost laughed. But he could not laugh at Valerie. Not now. In the dream, there had been love. Valerie, in her crushed, priggish way, had fallen in love. All right, tell her you still haven’t found the guy and then sympathize with her and get it over with. You have some real worrying to do.

  He turned to her. “I haven’t been able to—”

  “His name’s Prester.” She leaned close to the partition and whispered, “Oh, Roan, you saw me like that, in the pool. They hadn’t meant for you to see me at all. Oh, what you must think!”

  He said, just as softly, “I hadn’t let myself believe it.”

  “I know,” she said desperately. “I’m surprised you even came here.”

  “What do you mean—Oh, the pool! Do you know, it never occurred to me until this minute that you were—that you’d be—oh, forget it, Val. I’m just glad you found him. Prester, hm? Nice-looking fellow.”

  Her face lit up like a second sun. “Roan—really? I’m not a—hussy?”

  “You’re grand and the only person I know in this whole sterile, starched world who’s managed to live a little! I’m glad, Val! You don’t know—you can’t—what I’ve been through. Enough to make a dozen dreams. And it came like a dream—I mean parts and chunks of real-life things—things Granny was maundering about, things I’d seen, a girl I met once wrong-dialing—an accident, you little prude! I believed it was just a dream—I had to, I guess. I had to believe Flower and she told me it was.” Lord, he’d said the word right out loud in front of his sister!

  But she was quite composed, cheeks excitement-red, not disgusted-red, eyes bright and distant. “She’s lovely, Roan, just beautiful. She loves you. I know.”

  “Think she does?” He grinned till it hurt. “Oh, Val, Val—the maplesugar kettle.”

  “Mmm—the oat-field!”

  “The big table and the singing!”

  “Yes, and the children—all those children!”

  “What happened?” he cried. “How could such a thing happen?”

  She whispered fervently, “We could both be crazy. Or the whole world could be coming apart and we slipped in and out through a crack into—or maybe it really was a dream, but we had it together. But I don’t care, it was be
autiful and—and if you’d said I was a—because of—you’d have spoiled it and killed me, too. Is it all right then, Roan, is it really all right? Really?”

  “You’re sort of beautiful yourself. For a sister, that is.”

  “Oooh!” she squeaked, blushing and enormously pleased. Then, happily, “I’m glad I’m not you.”

  “Uh—why?”

  “How does it work, what makes it go, is it a dream, and, if not, what could it be? Be like me, Roan. It happened—for the rest of my life it has happened! But—I hope there’ll be more.”

  “If I find out how it works, what makes it go and so on, there will be more. So you just be glad I’m like me in that respect.”

  “If you found it, you—wouldn’t keep me out?”

  “If I couldn’t take you,” he said warmly, “I wouldn’t go. Now do you feel better?”

  “I’m going to kiss you!”

  He roared with laughter at the very idea in a place like this and, under the stares this attracted, she cried, “Be quiet—thunderfeet!” At the phrase from Flower’s little song, his heart twisted.

  She peeped at his face and said, “I’m sorry, Roan.”

  “Don’t be,” he said hoarsely. “For that second, she was right here.” He put out his hands, made fists, stared at them, then got them out of sight again. Flower—well, he’d have plenty of time to find her after 1600. “Val …”

  “I didn’t know anyone could be so happy!” she said. “What, Roan?”

  “Nothing. Just that I really am late,” he said, abruptly changing his mind. No need to air his troubles to her now—the news services would take care of that about 1612. Meanwhile, let her stay happy.

  They walked back to the transplat.

  “Roan, let’s come here every day and talk about it. I don’t know a thing you did and you don’t know what I did. Like the time—”

  “Sure I will, sure,” he said. “Take something pretty big to stop me.”

  She stopped dead. “There’s something the matter.”

  “Get on your ’plat. Everything’s fine. Hurry now.”

  She dialed and stepped up and was gone. He stood looking at the empty air, where her anxious face had been, until another passenger filled it. He hoped he hadn’t worried her.