Selected Stories

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Bril, keeping his eyes on the food, and trying to keep his universe from filling up with the sweet fresh scent of her as she bent over him, so near, said, “This is welcome.”

  She crossed to her husband and sank down at his feet, leaning back against his legs. He twisted her heavy hair gently in his fingers and she flashed a small smile up at him. Bril looked from the food, colorful as a corsage, here steaming, there gathering frost from the air, to the three smiling, expectant faces and did not know what to do.

  “Yes, this is welcome,” he said again, and still they sat there, watching him. He picked up the white cake and rose, looked out and around, into the house, through it and beyond. Where could one go in such a place?

  Steam from the tray touched his nostrils and saliva filled his mouth. He was hungry, but …

  He sighed, sat down, gently replaced the cake. He tried to smile and could not.

  “Does none of it please you?” asked Nina, concerned.

  “I can’t eat here!” said Bril; then, sensing something in the natives that had not been there before, he added, “thank you.” Again he looked at their controlled faces. He said to Nina, “It is very well prepared and good to look on.”

  “Then eat,” she invited, smiling again.

  This did something that their house, their garments, their appallingly easy ways—sprawling all over the place, letting their young speak up at will, the shameless admission that they had a patois of their own—that none of these things had been able to do. Without losing his implacable dignity by any slightest change of expression, he yet found himself blushing. Then he scowled and let the childish display turn to a flush of anger. He would be glad, he thought furiously, when he had the heart of this culture in the palm of his hand, to squeeze when he willed; then there would be an end to these hypocritical amenities and they would learn who could be humiliated.

  But these three faces, the boy’s so open and unconscious of wrong. Tanyne’s so strong and anxious for him, Nina’s—that face, that face of Nina’s—they were all utterly guileless. He must not let them know of his embarrassment. If they had planned it, he must not let them suspect his vulnerability.

  With an immense effort of will, he kept his voice low; still, it was harsh. “I think,” he said slowly, “that we on Kit Carson regard the matter of privacy perhaps a little more highly than you do.”

  They exchanged an astonished look, and then comprehension dawned visibly on Tanyne’s ruddy face. “You don’t eat together!”

  Bril did not shudder, but it was in his word: “No.”

  “Oh,” said Nina. “I’m so sorry!”

  Bril thought it wise not to discover exactly what she was sorry about. He said, “No matter. Customs differ. I shall eat when I am alone.”

  “Now that we understand,” said Tanyne, “go ahead. Eat.”

  But they sat there!

  “Oh,” said Nina, “I wish you spoke our other language; it would be so easy to explain!” She leaned forward to him, put out her arms, as if she could draw meaning itself from the air and cast it over him. “Please try to understand, Bril. You are very mistaken about one thing—we honor privacy above almost anything else.”

  “We don’t mean the same thing when we say it,” said Bril.

  “It means aloneness with oneself, doesn’t it? It means to do things, think or make or just be, without intrusion.”

  “So?” replied Wonyne happily, throwing out both hands in a gesture that said quod erat demonstrandum. “Go on then—eat! We won’t look!” and helped the situation not at all.

  “Wonyne’s right,” chuckled the father, “but, as usual, a little too direct. He means we can’t look, Bril. If you want privacy, we can’t see you.”

  Angry, reckless, Bril suddenly reached to the tray. He snatched up a goblet, the one she had indicated as water, thumbed a capsule out of his belt, popped it into his mouth, drank and swallowed. He banged the goblet back on the tray and shouted, “Now you’ve seen all you’re going to see.”

  With an indescribable expression, Nina drifted upward to her feet, bent like a dancer and touched the tray. It lifted and she guided it away across the courtyard.

  “All right,” said Wonyne. It was precisely as if someone had spoken and he had acknowledged. He lunged out, following his mother.

  What had been on her face?

  Something she could not contain; something rising to that smooth surface, about to reveal outlines, break through … anger? Bril hoped so. Insult? He could, he supposed, understand that. But—laughter? Don’t make it laugher, something within him pleaded.

  “Bril,” said Tanyne.

  For the second time, he was so lost in contemplation of the woman that Tanyne’s voice made him start.

  “What is it?”

  “If you will tell me what arrangements you would like for eating, I’ll see to it that you get them.”

  “You wouldn’t know how,” said Bril bluntly. He threw his sharp, cold gaze across the room and back. “You people don’t build walls you can’t see through, doors you can close.”

  “Why, no, we don’t.” As always, the giant left the insult and took only the words.

  I bet you don’t, Bril said silently, not even for—and a horrible suspicion began to grow within him. “We of Carson feel that all human history and development are away from the animal, toward something higher. We are, of course, chained to the animal state, but we do what we can to eliminate every animal act as a public spectacle.” Sternly, he waved a shining gauntlet at the great open house. “You have apparently not reached such an idealization. I have seen how you eat; doubtless you perform your other functions so openly.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Tanyne. “But with this—” he pointed “—it’s hardly the same thing.”

  “With what?”

  Tanyne again indicated one of the boulderlike objects. He tore off a clump of moss—it was real moss—and tossed it to the soft surface of one of the boulders. He reached down and touched one of the gray streaks. The moss sank into the surface the way a pebble will in quicksand, but much faster.

  “It will not accept living animal matter above a certain level of complexity,” he explained, “but it instantly absorbs every molecule of anything else, not only on the surface but for a distance above.”

  “And that’s a—a—where you—”

  Tan nodded and said that that was exactly what it was.

  “But—anyone can see you!”

  Tan shrugged and smiled. “How? That’s what I meant when I said it’s hardly the same thing. Of eating, we make a social occasion. But this—” he threw another clump of moss and watched it vanish—“just isn’t observed.” His sudden laugh rang out and again he said, “I wish you’d learn the language. Such a thing is so easy to express.”

  But Bril was concentrating on something else. “I appreciate your hospitality,” he said, using the phrase stiltedly, “but I’d like to be moving on.” He eyed the boulder distastefully. “And very soon.”

  “As you wish. You have a message for Xanadu. Deliver it, then.”

  “To your Government.”

  “To our Government. I told you before, Bril—when you’re ready, proceed.”

  “I cannot believe that you represent this planet!”

  “Neither can I,” said Tanyne pleasantly. “I don’t. Through me, you can speak to forty-one others, all Senators.”

  “Is there no other way?”

  Tanyne smiled. “Forty-one other ways. Speak to any of the others. It amounts to the same thing.”

  “And no higher government body?”

  Tanyne reached out a long arm and plucked a goblet from a niche in the moss bank. It was chased crystal with a luminous metallic rim.

  “Finding the highest point of the government of Xanadu is like finding the highest point on this,” he said. He ran a finger around the inside of the rim and the goblet chimed beautifully.

  “Pretty unstable,” growled Bril.

  Tanyne made it sing a
gain and replaced it; whether that was an answer or not, Bril could not know.

  He snorted, “No wonder the boy didn’t know what Government was.”

  “We don’t use the term,” said Tanyne. “We don’t need it. There are few things here that a citizen can’t handle for himself; I wish I could show you how few. If you’ll live with us a while, I will show you.”

  He caught Bril’s eye squarely as it returned from another disgusted and apprehensive trip to the boulder, and laughed outright. But the kindness in his voice as he went on quenched Bril’s upsurge of indignant fury, and a little question curled up: Is he managing me? But there wasn’t time to look at it.

  “Can your business wait until you know us, Bril? I tell you now, there is no centralized Government here, almost no government at all; we of the Senate are advisory. I tell you, too, that to speak to one Senator is to speak to all, and that you may do it now, this minute, or a year from now—whenever you like. I am telling you the truth and you may accept it or you may spend months, years, traveling this planet and checking up on me; you’ll always come out with the same answer.”

  Noncommittally, Bril said, “How do I know that what I tell you is accurately relayed to the others?”

  “It isn’t relayed,” said Tan frankly. “We all hear it simultaneously.”

  “Some sort of radio?”

  Tan hesitated, then nodded. “Some sort of radio.”

  “I won’t learn your language,” Bril said abruptly. “I can’t live as you do. If you can accept those conditions, I will stay a short while.”

  “Accept? We insist!” Tanyne bounded cheerfully to the niche where the goblet stood and held his palm up. A large, opaque sheet of shining white material rolled down and stopped. “Draw with your fingers,” he said.

  “Draw? Draw what?”

  “A place of your own. How you would like to live, eat, sleep, everything.”

  “I require very little. None of us on Kit Carson do.”

  He pointed the finger of his gauntlet like a weapon, made a couple of dabs in the corner of the screen to test the line, and then dashed off a very creditable parallelepiped. “Taking my height as one unit, I’d want this one-and-a-half long, one-and-a-quarter high. Slit vents at eye level, one at each end, two on each side, screened against insects—”

  “We have no preying insects,” said Tanyne.

  “Screened anyway, and with as near as unbreakable mesh as you have. Here a hook suitable for hanging a garment. Here a bed, flat, hard, with firm padding as thick as my hand, one-and-one-eighth units long, one-third wide. All sides under the bed enclosed and equipped as a locker, impregnable, and to which only I have the key or combination. Here a shelf one-third by one-quarter units, one-half unit off the floor, suitable for eating from a seated posture.

  “One of—those, if it’s self-contained and reliable,” he said edgily, casting a thumb at the boulderlike convenience. “The whole structure to be separate from all others on high ground and overhung by nothing—no trees, no cliffs, with approaches clear and visible from all sides; as strong as speed permits; and equipped with a light I can turn off and a door that only I can unlock.”

  “Very well,” said Tanyne easily. “Temperature?”

  “The same as this spot now.”

  “Anything else? Music? Pictures? We have some fine moving-”

  Bril, from the top of his dignity, snorted his most eloquent snort. “Water, if you can manage it. As to those other things, this is a dwelling, not a pleasure palace.”

  “I hope you will be comfortable in this—in it,” said Tanyne, with barely a trace of sarcasm.

  “It is precisely what I am used to,” Bril answered loftily.

  “Come, then.”

  “What?”

  The big man waved him on and passed through the arbor. Bril, blinking in the late pink sunlight, followed him.

  On the gentle slope above the house, halfway between it and the mountaintop beyond, was a meadow of the red grass Bril had noticed on his way from the waterfall. In the center of this meadow was a crowd of people, bustling like moths around a light, their flimsy, colorful clothes flashing and gleaming in a thousand shades. And in the middle of the crowd lay a coffin-shaped object.

  Bril could not believe his eyes, then stubbornly would not, and at last, as they came near, yielded and admitted it to himself: this was the structure he had just sketched.

  He walked more and more slowly as the wonder of it grew on him. He watched the people—children, even—swarming around and over the little building, sealing the edge between roof and wall with a humming device, laying screen on the slit-vents. A little girl, barely a toddler, came up to him fearlessly and in lisping Old Tongue asked for his hand, which she clapped to a tablet she carried.

  “To make your keys,” explained Tanyne, watching the child scurry off to a man waiting at the door.

  He took the tablet and disappeared inside, and they could see him kneel by the bed. A young boy overtook them and ran past, carrying a sheet of the same material the roof and walls were made of. It seemed light, but its slightly rough, pale-tan surface gave an impression of great toughness. As they drew up at the door, they saw the boy take the material and set it in position between the end of the bed and the doorway. He aligned it carefully, pressing it against the wall, and struck it once with the heel of his hand, and there was Bril’s required table, level, rigid, and that without braces and supports.

  “You seemed to like the looks of some of this, anyway.” It was Nina, with her tray. She floated it to the new table, waved cheerfully and left.

  “With you in a moment,” Tan called, adding three singing syllables in the Xanadu tongue which were, Bril concluded, an endearment of some kind; they certainly sounded like it. Tan turned back to him, smiling.

  “Well, Bril, how is it?”

  Bril could only ask, “Who gave the orders?”

  “You did,” said Tan, and there didn’t seem to be any answer to that.

  Already, through the open door, he could see the crowd drifting away, laughing, and singing their sweet language to each other. He saw a young man scoop up scarlet flowers from the pink sward and hand them to a smiling girl, and unaccountably the scene annoyed him. He turned away abruptly and went about the walls, thumping them and peering through the vents. Tanyne knelt by the bed, his big shoulders bulging as he tugged at the locker. It might as well have been solid rock.

  “Put your hand there,” he said, pointing, and Bril clapped his gauntlet to the plate he indicated.

  Sliding panels parted. Bril got down and peered inside. It had its own light, and he could see the buff-colored wall of the structure at the back and the heavy filleted partition which formed the bed uprights. He touched the panel again and the doors slid silently shut, so tight that he could barely see their meeting.

  “The door’s the same,” said Tanyne. “No one but you can open it. Here’s water. You didn’t say where to put it. If this is inconvenient …”

  When Bril put his hand near the spigot, water flowed into a catch basin beneath. “No, that is satisfactory. They work like specialists.”

  “They are,” said Tanyne.

  “Then they have built such a strange structure before?”

  “Never.”

  Bril looked at him sharply. This ingenuous barbarian surely could not be making a fool of him by design! No, this must be some slip of semantics, some shift in meaning over the years which separated each of them from the common ancestor. He would not forget it, but he set it aside for future thought.

  “Tanyne,” he asked suddenly, “how many are you in Xanadu?”

  “In a district, three hundred. On the planet, twelve, almost thirteen thousand.”

  “We are one and a half billion,” said Bril. “And what is your largest city?”

  “City,” said Tanyne, as if searching through the files of his memory. “Oh—city! We have none. There are forty-two districts like this one, some larger, some smaller.”
>
  “Your entire planetary population could be housed in one building within one city on Kit Carson. And how many generations have your people been here?”

  “Thirty-two, thirty-five, something like that.”

  “We settled Kit Carson not quite six Earth centuries ago. In point of time, then, it would seem that yours is the older culture. Wouldn’t you be interested in how we have been able to accomplish so much more?”

  “Fascinated,” said Tanyne.

  “You have some clever little handicrafts here,” Bril mused, “and a quite admirable cooperative ability. You could make a formidable thing of this world, if you wanted to, and if you had the proper guidance.”

  “Oh, could we really?” Tanyne seemed very pleased.

  “I must think,” said Bril somberly. “You are not what I—what I had supposed. Perhaps I shall stay a little longer than I had planned. Perhaps while I am learning about your people, you in turn could be learning about mine.”

  “Delighted,” said Tanyne. “Now is there anything else you need?”

  “Nothing. You may leave me.”

  His autocratic tone gained him only one of the big man’s pleasant, open-faced smiles. Tanyne waved his hand and left. Bril heard him calling his wife in ringing baritone notes, and her glad answer. He set his mailed hand against the door plate and it slid shut silently.

  Now what, he asked himself, got me to do all that bragging? Then the astonishment at the people of Xanadu rose up and answered the question for him. What manner of people are specialists at something they have never done before?

  He got out of his stiff, polished, heavy uniform, his gauntlets, his boots. They were all wired together, power supply in the boots, controls and computers in the trousers and belt, sensory mechs in the tunic, projectors and field loci in the gloves.

  He hung the clothes on the hook provided and set the alarm field for anything larger than a mouse any closer than thirty meters. He dialed a radiation dome to cover his structure and exclude all spy beams or radiation weapons. Then he swung his left gauntlet on its cable over to the table and went to work on one small corner.

  In half an hour, he had found a combination of heat and pressure that would destroy the pale brown board, and he sat down on the edge of the bed, limp with amazement. You could build a spaceship with stuff like this.