Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Tod and his five shipmates were hand-picked. They had superiorities—mechanical, mathematical, and artistic aptitudes. But they were not all completely superior. One does not populate a colony with leaders alone and expect it to live. They, like the rest of their cargo (machine designs, microfilms of music and art, technical and medical writings, novels and entertainment) were neither advanced nor extraordinary. Except for Teague, they were the tested median, the competent; they were basic blood for a mass, rather than an elite.

  Tod glanced around the blank walls and into the corner where a thin line delineated the sealed door. He ached to fling it open and skid across the corridor, punch the control which would slide away the armor which masked the port, and soak himself in his first glimpse of outer space. He had heard so much about it, but he had never seen it—they had all been deep in their timeless sleep before the ship had blasted off.

  But he sighed and went instead to the Coffins.

  Alma’s was still closed, but there was sound and motion, in varying degrees, from all the others.

  He glanced first into April’s Coffin. She seemed to be asleep now. The needle-cluster and manipulators had withdrawn. Her skin glowed; it was alive and as unlike its former monochrome waxiness as it could be. He smiled briefly and went to look at Teague.

  Teague, too, was in real slumber. The fierce vertical line between his brows was shallow now, and the hard, deft hands lax and uncharacteristically purposeless. Tod had never seen him before without a focus for those narrow, blazing green eyes, without decisive spring and balance in his pose. It was good, somehow, to feel that for all his responsibilities, Teague could be as helpless as anyone.

  Tod smiled as he passed Alma’s closed Coffin. He always smiled at Alma when he saw her, when he heard her voice, when she crossed his thoughts. It was possible to be very brave around Alma, for gentleness and comfort were so ready that it was almost not necessary to call upon them. One could bear anything, knowing she was there.

  Tod crossed the chamber and looked at the last pair. Carl was a furious blur of motion, his needle-cluster swinging free, his manipulators in the final phase. He grunted instead of screaming, a series of implosive, startled gasps. His eyes were open but only the whites showed.

  Moira was quite relaxed, turned on her side, poured out on the floor of the Coffin like a long golden cat. She seemed in a contented abandonment of untroubled sleep.

  He heard a new sound and went back to April. She was sitting up, cross-legged, her head bowed apparently in deep concentration. Tod understood; he knew that sense of achievement and the dedication of an entire psyche to the proposition that these weak and trembling arms which hold one up shall not bend.

  He reached in and gently lifted the soft white hair away from her face. She raised the albino’s fathomless ruby eyes to him and whimpered.

  “Come on,” he said quietly. “We’re here.” When she did not move, he balanced on his stomach on the edge of the Coffin and put one hand between her shoulder blades. “Come on.”

  She pitched forward but he caught her so that she stayed kneeling. He drew her up and forward and put her hands on the bar. “Hold tight, Ape,” he said. She did, while he lifted her thin body out of the Coffin and stood her on the top step. “Let go now. Lean on me.”

  Mechanically, she obeyed, and he brought her down until she sat, as he had, on the bottom step. He punched the switch at her feet and put the capsules in her mouth while she looked up at him numbly, as if hypnotized. He got her beaker, thumped it, held it until its foaming subsided, and then put an arm around her shoulders while she drank. She closed her eyes and slumped against him, breathing deeply at first, and later, for a moment that frightened him, not at all. Then she sighed, “Tod …”

  “I’m here, Ape.”

  She straightened up, turned and looked at him. She seemed to be trying to smile, but she shivered instead. “I’m cold.”

  He rose, keeping one hand on her shoulder until he was sure she could sit up unassisted, and then brought her a cloak from the clips outside the Coffin. He helped her with it, knelt and put on her slippers for her. She sat quite still, hugging the garment tight to her. At last she looked around and back; up, around, and back again. “We’re—there!” she breathed.

  “We’re here,” he corrected.

  “Yes, here. Here. How long do you suppose we …”

  “We won’t know exactly until we can take some readings. Twenty-five, twenty-seven years—maybe more.”

  She said, “I could be old, old—” She touched her face, brought her fingertips down to the sides of her neck. “I could be forty, even!”

  He laughed at her, and then a movement caught the corner of his eye. “Carl!”

  Carl was sitting sidewise on the edge of his Coffin, his feet still inside. Weak or no, bemused as could be expected, Carl should have grinned at Tod, should have made some healthy, swaggering gesture. Instead he sat still, staring about him in utter puzzlement. Tod went to him. “Carl! Carl, we’re here!”

  Carl looked at him dully. Tod was unaccountably disturbed. Carl always shouted, always bounced; Carl had always seemed to be just a bit larger inside than he was outside, ready to burst through, always thinking faster, laughing more quickly than anyone else.

  He allowed Tod to help him down the steps, and sat heavily while Tod got his capsules and beaker for him. Waiting for the liquid to subside, he looked around numbly. Then drank, and almost toppled. April and Tod held him up. When he straightened again, it was abruptly. “Hey!” he roared. “We’re here!” He looked up at them. “April! Tod-o! Well what do you know—how are you, kids?”

  “Carl?” The voice was the voice of a flute, if a flute could whisper. They looked up. There was a small golden surf of hair tumbled on and over the edge of Moira’s Coffin.

  Weakly, eagerly, they clambered up to Moira and helped her out. Carl breathed such a sigh of relief that Tod and April stopped to smile at him, at each other.

  Carl shrugged out of his weakness as if it were an uncomfortable garment and went to be close to Moira, to care about Moira and nothing else.

  A deep labored voice called, “Who’s up?”

  “Teague! It’s Teague … all of us, Teague,” called Tod. “Carl and Moira and April and me. All except Alma.”

  Slowly Teague’s great head rose out of the Coffin. He looked around with the controlled motion of a radar sweep. When his head stopped its one turning, the motion seemed relayed to his body, which began to move steadily upward. The four who watched him knew intimately what this cost him in sheer willpower, yet no one made any effort to help. Unasked, one did not help Teague.

  One leg over, the second. He ignored the bar and stepped down to seat himself on the bottom step as if it were a throne. His hands moved very slowly but without faltering as he helped himself to the capsules, then the beaker. He permitted himself a moment of stillness, eyes closed, nostrils pinched; then life coursed strongly into him. It was as if his muscles visibly filled out a little. He seemed heavier and taller, and when he opened his eyes, they were the deeply vital, commanding light-sources which had drawn them, linked them, led them all during their training.

  He looked toward the door in the corner. “Has anyone—”

  “We were waiting for you,” said Tod. “Shall we … can we go look now? I want to see the stars.”

  “We’ll see to Alma first.” Teague rose, ignoring the lip of his Coffin and the handhold it offered. He went to Alma’s. With his height, he was the only one among them who could see through the top plate without mounting the steps.

  Then, without turning, he said, “Wait.”

  The others, half across the room from him, stopped. Teague turned to them. There was no expression on his face at all. He stood quite motionless for perhaps ten seconds, and then quietly released a breath. He mounted the steps of Alma’s Coffin, reached, and the side nearest his own machine sank silently into the floor. He stepped down, and spent a long moment bent over the body insid
e. From where they stood, tense and frightened, the others could not see inside. They made no effort to move closer.

  “Tod,” said Teague, “get the kit. Surgery Lambda. Moira, I’ll need you.”

  The shock of it went to Tod’s bones, regenerated, struck him again; yet so conditioned was he to Teague’s commands that he was on his feet and moving before Teague had stopped speaking. He went to the after bulkhead and swung open a panel, pressed a stud. There was a metallic whisper, and the heavy case slid out at his feet. He lugged it over to Teague, and helped him rack it on the side of the Coffin. Teague immediately plunged his hands through the membrane at one end of the kit, nodding to Moira to do likewise at the other. Tod stepped back, studiously avoiding a glance in at Alma, and returned to April. She put both her hands tight around his left biceps and leaned close. “Lambda.…” she whispered.

  “That’s … parturition, isn’t it?”

  He shook his head. “Parturition is Surgery Kappa,” he said painfully. He swallowed. “Lambda’s cesarean.”

  Her crimson eyes widened. “Cesarean? Alma? She’d never need a cesarean!”

  He turned to look at her, but he could not see, his eyes stung so. “Not while she lived, she wouldn’t,” he whispered. He felt the small white hands tighten painfully on his arm. Across the room, Carl sat quietly. Tod squashed the water out of his eyes with the heel of his hand. Carl began pounding knuckles, very slowly, against his own temple.

  Teague and Moira were busy for a long time.

  II

  Tod pulled in his legs and lowered his head until the kneecaps pressed cruelly against his eyebrow ridges. He hugged his shins, ground his back into the wall-panels, and in this red-spangled blackness he let himself live back and back to Alma and joy, Alma and comfort, Alma and courage.

  He had sat once, just this way, twisted by misery and anger, blind and helpless, in a dark corner of an equipment shed at the spaceport. The rumor had circulated that April would not come after all, because albinism and the Sirius Rock would not mix. It turned out to be untrue, but that did not matter at the time. He had punched her, punched Alma! because in all the world he had been given nothing else to strike out at, and she had found him and had sat down to be with him. She had not even touched her face, where the blood ran; she simply waited until at last he flung himself on her lap and wept like an infant. And no one but he and Alma ever knew of it.…

  He remembered Alma with the spaceport children, rolling and tumbling on the lawn with them, and in the pool; and he remembered Alma, her face still, looking up at the stars with her soft and gentle eyes, and in those eyes he had seen a challenge as implacable and pervasive as space itself. The tumbling on the lawn, the towering dignity—these co-existed in Alma without friction. He remembered things she had said to him; for each of the things he could recall the kind of light, the way he stood, the very smell of the air at the time. “Never be afraid, Tod. Just think of the worst possible thing that might happen. What you’re afraid of will probably not be that bad—and anything else just has to be better.” And she said once, “Don’t confuse logic and truth, however good the logic. You can stick one end of logic in solid ground and throw the other end clear out of the cosmos without breaking it. Truth’s a little less flexible.” And, “Of course you need to be loved, Tod! Don’t be ashamed of that, or try to change it. It’s not a thing you have to worry about, ever. You are loved. April loves you. And I love you. Maybe I love you even more than April, because she loves everything you are, but I love everything you were and ever will be.”

  And some of the memories were deeper and more important even than these, but were memories of small things—the meeting of eyes, the touch of a hand, the sound of laughter or a snatch of song, distantly.

  Tod descended from memory into a blackness that was only loss and despair, and then a numbness, followed by a reluctant awareness. He became conscious of what, in itself, seemed the merest of trifles: that there was a significance in his pose there against the bulkhead. Unmoving, he considered it. It was comfortable, to be so turned in upon oneself, and so protected, unaware … and Alma would have hated to see him this way.

  He threw up his head, and self-consciously straightened from his foetal posture. That’s over now, he told himself furiously, and then, dazed, wondered what he had meant.

  He turned to look at April. She was huddled miserably against him, her face and body lax, stopped, disinterested. He thumped his elbow into her ribs, hard enough to make her remember she had ribs. She looked up into his eyes and said, “How? How could …”

  Tod understood. Of the three couples standard for each ship of the Sirian project, one traditionally would beget children on the planet; one, earlier, as soon as possible after awakening; and one still earlier, for conception would take place within the Coffin. But—not before awakening, and surely not long enough before to permit of gestation. It was an impossibility; the vital processes were so retarded within the Coffin that, effectively, there would be no stirring of life at all. So—“How?” April pleaded. “How could …”

  Tod gazed upon his own misery, then April’s, and wondered what it must be that Teague was going through.

  Teague, without looking up, said, “Tod.”

  Tod patted April’s shoulder, rose and went to Teague. He did not look into the Coffin. Teague, still working steadily, tilted his head to one side to point. “I need a little more room here.”

  Tod lifted the transparent cube Teague had indicated and looked at the squirming pink bundle inside.

  He almost smiled. It was a nice baby. He took one step away and Teague said, “Take ’em all, Tod.”

  He stacked them and carried them to where April sat. Carl rose and came over, and knelt. The boxes hummed—a vibration which could be felt, not heard—as nutrient-bearing air circulated inside and back to the power-packs. “A nice normal deliv—I mean, a nice normal batch o’ brats,” Carl said. “Four girls, one boy. Just right.”

  Tod looked up at him. “There’s one more, I think.”

  There was—another girl. Moira brought it over in the sixth box. “Sweet,” April breathed, watching them. “They’re sweet.”

  Moira said, wearily, “That’s all.”

  Tod looked up at her.

  “Alma …?”

  Moira waved laxly toward the neat stack of incubators. “That’s all,” she whispered tiredly, and went to Carl.

  That’s all there is of Alma, Tod thought bitterly. He glanced across at Teague. The tall figure raised a steady hand, wiped his face with his upper arm. His raised hand touched the high end of the Coffin, and for an instant held a grip. Teague’s face lay against his arm, pillowed, hidden and still. Then he completed the wiping motion and began stripping the sterile plastic skin from his hands. Tod’s heart went out to him, but he bit the insides of his cheeks and kept silent. A strange tradition, thought Tod, that makes it impolite to grieve …

  Teague dropped the shreds of plastic into the disposal slot and turned to face them. He looked at each in turn, and each in turn found some measure of control. He turned then, and pulled a lever, and the side of Alma’s Coffin slid silently up.

  Good-bye …

  Tod put his back against the bulkhead and slid down beside April. He put an arm over her shoulders. Carl and Moira sat close, holding hands. Moira’s eyes were shadowed but very much awake. Carl bore an expression almost of sullenness. Tod glanced, then glared at the boxes. Three of the babies were crying, though of course they could not be heard through the plastic incubators. Tod was suddenly conscious of Teague’s eyes upon him. He flushed, and then let his anger drain to the capacious inner reservoir which must hold it and all his grief as well.

  When he had their attention, Teague sat cross-legged before them and placed a small object on the floor.

  Tod looked at the object. At first glance it seemed to be a metal spring about as long as his thumb, mounted vertically on a black base. Then he realized that it was an art object of some kind, made
of a golden substance which shimmered and all but flowed. It was an interlocked double spiral; the turns went round and up, round and down, round and up again, the texture of the gold clearly indicating, in a strange and alive way, which symbolized a rising and falling flux. Shaped as if it had been wound on a cylinder and the cylinder removed, the thing was formed of a continuous wire or rod which had no beginning and no end, but which turned and rose and turned and descended again in an exquisite continuity.… Its base was formless, an almost-smoke just as the gold showed an almost-flux; and it was as lightless as ylem.

  Teague said, “This was in Alma’s Coffin. It was not there when we left Earth.”

  “It must have been,” said Carl flatly.

  Teague silently shook his head. April opened her lips, closed them again. Teague said, “Yes, April?”

  April shook her head. “Nothing, Teague. Really nothing.” But because Teague kept looking at her, waiting, she said, “I was going to say … it’s beautiful.” She hung her head.

  Teague’s lips twitched. Tod could sense the sympathy there. He stroked April’s silver hair. She responded, moving her shoulder slightly under his hand. “What is it, Teague?”

  When Teague would not answer, Moira asked, “Did it … had it anything to do with Alma?”

  Teague picked it up thoughtfully. Tod could see the yellow loom it cast against his throat and cheek, the golden points it built in his eyes. “Something did.” He paused. “You know she was supposed to conceive on awakening. But to give birth—”

  Carl cracked a closed hand against his forehead. “She must have been awake for anyway two hundred and eighty days!”