Baby Is Three Read online

  Theodore Sturgeon, Congers, New York, 1952.

  Copyright © 1999 by the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. Previously published materials copyright © 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953 by Theodore Sturgeon and the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. Foreword copyright © 1999 by David Crosby. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

  Published by

  North Atlantic Books

  P.O. Box 12327

  Berkeley, California 94712

  Cover art by Richard M. Powers

  Cover design by Catherine Campaigne

  Baby Is Three is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

  North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Sturgeon, Theodore

  Baby is three / Theodore Sturgeon : edited by Paul Williams.

  p. cm. — (The complete stories of Theodore Sturgeon : v. 6)

  Contents: The stars are the Styx—Rule of three—Shadow, shadow on the wall—Special aptitude—Make room for me—The traveling crag—Excalibur and the atom—The incubi of parallel X—Never underestimate—The sex opposite—Baby is three.

  eISBN: 978-1-58394-750-0

  1. Science fiction, American. 2. Fantasy fiction, American. I. Williams, Paul, 1948– . II. Title. III. Series: Sturgeon, Theodore. Short stories : v. 6.

  PS3569.T875 A6 1999 vol. 6

  813′.54—dc21

  99-31975

  v3.1

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  THEODORE HAMILTON STURGEON was born February 26, 1918, and died May 8, 1985. This is the sixth of a series of volumes that will collect all of his short fiction of all types and all lengths shorter than a novel. The volumes and the stories within the volumes are organized chronologically by order of composition (insofar as it can be determined). This sixth volume contains stories written between 1950 and 1952. Two have never before appeared in a Sturgeon collection. The title story, “Baby Is Three,” is the original text of one of Sturgeon’s most-loved stories, as it appeared in a magazine before he significantly reworked its ending for the purposes of More Than Human, the novel he wrote by adding extensive material about what happened to Homo Gestalt before and after the events described in “Baby Is Three.”

  Preparation of each of these volumes would not be possible without the hard work and invaluable participation of Noël Sturgeon, Debbie Notkin, and our publishers, Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. I would also like to thank, for their significant assistance with this volume, David Crosby, the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust, Emily Weinert, Marion Sturgeon, Jayne Williams, Ralph Vicinanza, Ron Colone, David Hartwell, Tair Powers, Eric Weeks, Bill Glass, Dixon Chandler, Gordon Benson, Jr. and Phil Stephensen-Payne, Paula Morrison, Catherine Campaigne, T. V. Reed, Cindy Lee Berryhill, The Other Change of Hobbit Bookstore, and all of you who have expressed your interest and support.

  BOOKS BY THEODORE STURGEON

  Without Sorcery (1948)

  The Dreaming Jewels [aka The Synthetic Man] (1950)

  More Than Human (1953)

  E Pluribus Unicorn (1953)

  Caviar (1955)

  A Way Home (1955)

  The King and Four Queens (1956)

  I, Libertine (1956)

  A Touch of Strange (1958)

  The Cosmic Rape [aka To Marry Medusa] (1958)

  Aliens 4 (1959)

  Venus Plus X (1960)

  Beyond (1960)

  Some of Your Blood (1961)

  Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)

  The Player on the Other Side (1963)

  Sturgeon in Orbit (1964)

  Starshine (1966)

  The Rare Breed (1966)

  Sturgeon Is Alive and Well … (1971)

  The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon (1972)

  Sturgeon’s West (with Don Ward) (1973)

  Case and the Dreamer (1974)

  Visions and Venturers (1978)

  Maturity (1979)

  The Stars Are the Styx (1979)

  The Golden Helix (1979)

  Alien Cargo (1984)

  Godbody (1986)

  A Touch of Sturgeon (1987)

  The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff (1989)

  Argyll (1993)

  Star Trek, The Joy Machine (with James Gunn) (1996)

  THE COMPLETE STORIES SERIES

  1. The Ultimate Egoist (1994)

  2. Microcosmic God (1995)

  3. Killdozer! (1996)

  4. Thunder and Roses (1997)

  5. The Perfect Host (1998)

  6. Baby Is Three (1999)

  7. A Saucer of Loneliness (2000)

  8. Bright Segment (2002)

  9. And Now the News … (2003)

  10. The Man Who Lost the Sea (2005)

  11. The Nail and the Oracle (2007)

  12. Slow Sculpture (2009)

  13. Case and the Dreamer (2010)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Editor’s Note

  Other Books by This Author

  Foreword by David Crosby

  Shadow, Shadow on the Wall

  The Stars Are the Styx

  Rule of Three

  Make Room for Me

  Special Aptitude

  The Traveling Crag

  Excalibur and the Atom

  The Incubi of Parallel X

  Never Underestimate

  The Sex Opposite

  Baby Is Three

  Story Notes by Paul Williams

  Appendix:

  Two Autobiographical Essays

  Foreword

  by David Crosby

  I’M AN INVETERATE LOVER of science fiction. I always have been and still am. I read it constantly. I started as an early teenager—long before the Byrds, or Crosby, Stills & Nash, even before I became a musician—back in the mid-1950s. I started with Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels, Rocket Ship Galileo then Red Planet, Farmer in the Sky, Between Planets, Space Cadet … I read them all. They were my escape. I was a little chubby kid in a high school, not at all popular, and lonely, and this was a world where I could … I could really dig it. Then it just progressed, the natural steps you would expect, Clarke and Van Vogt, Campbell, Analog … and I just went right into it from there.

  Then somebody passed Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human to me. And that novel—which of course is built around the title story of this collection, “Baby Is Three”—was the standout for me. The relationship described in that story, people transcending the lacks in themselves and making a whole that’s greater than anybody else could be because of it … There was a perceived lack in me and I felt sort of like a person that wasn’t gonna … So there was a strong emotional resonance for me—and for every other little lonely kid—with those people, because they were different too. They didn’t fit in either. But when they linked, they were this awesome being …

  Paul Williams tells me my friend Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead has described “Baby Is Three”/More Than Human as the only model he and his bandmates had to understand what was
happening to them when they began playing together. He might have been more conscious about that than I was, but it affected me in the same place. There is a thing that happens in a band, where these diverse human beings link up, through this language that they’re speaking together, this music.

  They create a thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And there springs into existence over them another being. So if there’s four of them, there’s a fifth being, or if there’s five there’s a sixth being, that is a composite of them, and that is bigger than all of them. And if they understand what they’re doing, they submit to this personality, they give up their individuality for this unity. And they create this new being that can make the art of the instant, that can make the magic happen when you’re playing live.

  That’s how it feels. And it requires a—if it isn’t telepathic, it’s certainly empathic—link-up and union. And the relationship described first by Theodore Sturgeon in “Baby Is Three” really hit all of us that wanted that kind of “above the family,” taking the idea of a family to a new place, to a new level.

  It really rang my bell. When I was a child my favorite comic book was one about a whole group of very different orphans who got together and somebody let them live together on a ranch, and they ran this ranch together. And when I read More Than Human, I—and all the other kids who were loners and didn’t really fit in—said, “I could fit in there. I would love to be part of that kind of incredible link-up where people really understand each other and love each other and have a unity of purpose.” It was a high thing to do. And bands emotionally so closely resembled that, that it was inevitable that we musicians would love that story.

  Although I loved the story before I became a band member. But once I became a band member I had this whole resonant blueprint in the back of my head about what that was. And so I understood what it was and I submitted to it, and I have always loved being a part of that, more than being a solo … I like union so much more than autonomy that there must have been some basic tilt in me towards it. I think “Baby Is Three” was a large part of me having that tilt. It just rang my bell. Big time.

  That homo gestalt experience of creating a fifth entity by forming a four-person unit is such a startling thing, it’s very hard to explain it to people who haven’t played music with other people or done some kind of unity-forming for a purpose. I’m sure a group of Amish farmers getting together for a barn-raising have some of the same thing. But with a band, the thing that you’re trying to create is so ethereal, and so hard to put salt on its tail, that it’s very difficult to explain to people when it’s there and when it’s not there. Too many people think that it’s just about turning up and striking a pose. Trying to do the other thing is intricate, and requires people with enough ego to go on stage who are also over here to dissociate from the ego and disassemble it, in order to create this other thing. It’s a rare deal. Anybody, any really good band, particularly a band that improvises together—the Grateful Dead for absolute sure, they were built on it, it was their lifeblood—any band that improvises together and tries to push the envelope (which of course is where the best shit is), they know this thing. Anybody from a band like that would read “Baby Is Three” and say, “Oh yeah! Yeah!!” and recognize it right away.

  I met Ted Sturgeon in 1970. He was an unusual guy. He wasn’t all cosmic and airy-fairy in how he thought about things. He was actually sort of acerbic and funny and had a great kind of wry wit about stuff. But he could conceive idealism on a level that most other people couldn’t get to. He was a great cat. We put him through a really unbearable experience, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young did, when we hired him to write a screenplay for Wooden Ships, a proposed CSNY film based on one of our songs.

  It was a nightmare for him, because each guy would get him alone and tell him how he wanted the script to be. And of course in each guy’s view, he was the hero. The other guys were sort of posed around the edges, like a Greek chorus. Mine was populated with young girls—and had all this sex in it. Stephen’s was populated by this lonely military hero out there. Neil took one look at the whole film idea and said, “No … No, man, I don’t think so, man …” It was hysterical. We were all such complete egotists by that time, and living so much in our own universes, and everything was so contrary to the vision I just told you about …

  It was a complete hopeless tar-baby of a project. And Ted tried to do it in all good faith. He kept trying to be positive about it. He would write and write and write and say, “What about this?” And we’d say, “Well, no, that’s too much of them and not enough of me.” It was a terrible thing, and I’m mostly responsible for having done it to him. He had a good sense of humor about it. I’m sure he must have laughed a lot privately

  He was a delightful man, very very very bright, great sense of humor, witty, had a good skeptical and skewed take on things. I regret that I didn’t get to hang out with him more. I should have stayed friends with him and stayed close to him, but at a certain point there the drugs took over, and friendships got less important …

  Shadow, Shadow on the Wall

  IT WAS WELL after bedtime and Bobby was asleep, dreaming of a place with black butterflies that stayed, and a dog with a wuffly nose and blunt, friendly rubber teeth. It was a dark place, and comfy with all the edges blurred and soft, and he could make them all jump if he wanted to.

  But then there was a sharp scythe of light that swept everything away (except in the shaded smoothness of the blank wall beside the door: someone always lived there) and Mommy Gwen was coming into the room with a blaze of hallway behind her. She clicked the high-up switch, the one he couldn’t reach, and room light came cruelly. Mommy Gwen changed from a flat, black, light-rimmed set of cardboard triangles to a night-lit, daytime sort of Mommy Gwen.

  Her hair was wide and her chin was narrow. Her shoulders were wide and her waist was narrow. Her hips were wide and her skirt was narrow, and under it all were her two hard silky sticks of legs. Her arms hung down from the wide tips of her shoulders, straight and elbowless when she walked. She never moved her arms when she walked. She never moved them at all unless she wanted to do something with them.

  “You’re awake.” Her voice was hard, wide, flat, pointy too.

  “I was asleep,” said Bobby.

  “Don’t contradict. Get up.”

  Bobby sat up and fisted his eyes. “Is Daddy—”

  “Your father is not in the house. He went away. He won’t be back for a whole day—maybe two. So there’s no use in yelling for him.”

  “Wasn’t going to yell for him, Mommy Gwen.”

  “Very well, then. Get up.”

  Wondering, Bobby got up. His flannel sleeper pulled at his shoulders and at the soles of his snug-covered feet. He felt tousled.

  “Get your toys, Bobby.”

  “What toys, Mommy Gwen?”

  Her voice snapped like wet clothes on the line in a big wind. “Your toys—all of them!”

  He went to the playbox and lifted the lid. He stopped, turned, stared at her. Her arms hung straight at her sides, as straight as her two level eyes under the straight shelf of brow. He bent to the playbox. Gollywick, Humptydoodle and the blocks came out; the starry-wormy piece of the old phonograph, the cracked sugar egg with the peephole girl in it, the cardboard kaleidoscope and the magic set with the seven silvery rings that made a trick he couldn’t do but Daddy could. He took them all out and put them on the floor.

  “Here,” said Mommy Gwen. She moved one straight-line arm to point to her feet with one straight-line finger. He picked up the toys and brought them to her, one at a time, two at a time, until they were all there. “Neatly, neatly,” she muttered. She bent in the middle like a garage door and did brisk things with the toys, so that the scattered pile of them became a square stack. “Get the rest,” she said.

  He looked into the playbox and took out the old wood-framed slate and the mixed-up box of crayons; the English annual story book and an old candle, and that
was all for the playbox. In the closet were some little boxing-gloves and a tennis racket with broken strings, and an old ukulele with no strings at all. And that was all for the closet. He brought them to her, and she stacked them with the others.

  “Those things, too,” she said, and at last bent her elbow to point around. From the dresser came the two squirrels and a monkey that Daddy had made from pipe cleaners, a small square of plate-glass he had found on Henry Street; a clockwork top that sounded like a church talking, and the broken clock Jerry had left on the porch last week. Bobby brought them all to Mommy Gwen, every one. “Are you going to put me in another room?”

  “No indeed.” Mommy Gwen took up the neat stack of toys. It was tall in her arms. The top fell off and thunked on the floor, bounced, chased around in a tilted circle. “Get it,” said Mommy Gwen.

  Bobby picked it up and reached it toward her. She stooped until he could put it on the stack, snug between the tennis racket and the box of crayons. Mommy Gwen didn’t say thank you, but went away through the door, leaving Bobby standing, staring after her. He heard her hard feet go down the hall, heard the bump as she pressed open the guest-room door with her knee. There was a rattle and click as she set his toys down on the spare bed, the one without a spread, the one with dusty blue ticking on the mattress. Then she came back again.

  “Why aren’t you in bed?” She clapped her hands. They sounded dry, like sticks breaking. Startled, he popped back into bed and drew the covers up to his chin. There used to be someone who had a warm cheek and a soft word for him when he did that, but that was a long time ago. He lay with eyes round in the light, looking at Mommy Gwen.

  “You’ve been bad,” she said. “You broke a window in the shed and you tracked mud into my kitchen and you’ve been noisy and rude. So you’ll stay right here in this room without your toys until I say you can come out. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” he said. He said quickly, because he remembered in time, “Yes ma’am.”