Slow Sculpture: Volume XII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon Read online

  Slow Sculpture: Volume XII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Spider Robinson

  VERSION 1.0 DTD 032600

  SLOW SCULPTURE

  Theodore Sturgeon

  He didn’t know who he was when she met him—well, not many people did. He was in the high orchard doing something under a pear tree. The land smelled of late summer and wind—bronze, it smelled bronze.

  He looked up at a compact girl in her mid-twenties, at a fearless face and eyes the same color as her hair, which was extraordinary because her hair was red-gold. She looked down at a leather-skinned man in his forties, at a gold-leaf electroscope in ‘his hand, and felt she was an intruder.

  She said, “Oh” in what was apparently the right way.

  Because he nodded once and said, “Hold this” and there could then be no thought of intrusion.

  She kneeled down beside him and took the instrument, holding it exactly where he positioned her hand. He moved away a little and struck a tuning fork against his kneecap.

  “What’s it doing?”

  He had a good voice, the kind of voice strangers notice and listen to.

  She looked at the delicate leaves of gold in the glass shield of the electroscope.

  “They’re moving apart.”

  He struck the tuning fork again and the leaves pressed away from one another.

  “Much?”

  “About forty-five degrees when you hit the fork.”

  “Good—that’s about the most we’ll get.” From a pocket of his ‘bush jacket be drew a sack of chalk dust and dropped a small handful on the ground. “I’ll move now. You stay right there and tell me how much the leaves separate.”

  He traveled around the pear tree in a zigzag course, striking his tuning fork while she called out numbers ten degrees, thirty, five, twenty, nothing. Whenever the gold foil pressed apart to maximum—forty degrees or more—he dropped more chalk. When he was finished the tree was surrounded by a rough oval of white dots. He took out a notebook and diagramed them and the tree, put away the book and took ‘the electroscope out of her hands.

  . “Were you looking for something?” he asked her.

  “No,” she said. “Yes.”

  He could smile. Though it did not ‘last long she found the expression surprising in a face like his.

  “That’s not what is called, in a court of law, a responsive answer.”

  She glanced across the hillside, metallic in that late light. There wasn’t much on it—rocks, weeds the summer was done with, a tree or so, the orchard. Anyone present had come a long way to get here.

  “It wasn’t a simple question,” she said, tried to smile and burst into tears.

  She was sorry and said so.

  “Why?” he asked.

  This was the first time she was to experience this ask-the-next-question thing of his. It was unsettling. It always would ‘be—never less, sometimes a great deal more.

  “Well—one doesn’t have emotional explosions in pub-lic.”

  “You do. I don’t know this ‘one’ you’re talking about.”

  “I guess I don’t either, now that you mention it.”

  “Tell the truth then. No sense in going around and around about it: He’ll think that I … and the like. I’ll think what I think, whatever you say. Or—go down the mountain and just don’t say any more.” She did not turn to go, so he added: “Try the truth, then. If it’s important, it’s simple. And if it’s simple it’s easy to say.”

  “I’m going to die!” she cried.

  “So am 1.”

  “I have a lump in my breast.”

  “Come up to the house and I’ll fix it.”

  Without another word he turned away and started through the orchard. Startled half out of her wits, indig-nant and full of insane hope, experiencing, even, a quick curl of astonished laughter, she stood for a moment watching him go and ‘then found herself (at what point did I decide?) running after him.

  She caught up with him on the uphill margin of the orchard.

  “Are you a doctor?”

  He appeared not to notice that she had waited, had run.

  “No,” he said and, walking on, appeared not to see her stand again pulling at her lower lip, then run again to catch up.

  “I must be out of my mind,” she said, joining him on a garden path.

  She said it to herself. He must have known because he did not answer. The garden was alive with defiant chrysanthemums and a pond in which she saw the flicker of a pair of redcap imperials—silver, not gold fish—the largest she had ever seen. Then—the house.

  First it was part of the garden with its colonnaded Terrace—and then, with its rock walls (too massive to be called fieldstone) part of the mountain. It was on and in the hillside. Its roof paralleled the skylines, front and sides, and part of it was backed against an out-jutting cliff face. The door, beamed and studded and featuring two archers’ slits, was opened for them (but there was no one there) and when it closed it was silent, a far more solid exclusion of things outside than any click or clang of latch or bolt.

  She stood with her back against it watching him cross what seemed to be the central well of the house, or at least this part of it. It was a kind of small court in the center of which was an atrium, glazed on all of its five sides and open to the sky at the top. In it was a tree, a cypress or juniper, gnarled and twisted and with the turnedback, paralleled, sculptured appearance of what the Japanese call bonsai.

  “Aren’t you coming?” he called, holding open a door behind the atrium.

  “Bonsai just aren’t fifteen feet .tail,” she said.

  “This one is.”

  She walked past it slowly, looking.

  “How long have you had it?”

  His tone of voice said he was immensely pleased. It is a clumsiness to ask the owner of a bonsai how old it is—you are then demanding to know if it is his work or if he has acquired and continued the concept of another; you are tempting him to claim for his own the concept and the meticulous labor of someone else and it becomes rude to tell a man he is being tested. Hence, How long have you had it? is polite, forbearing, profoundly cour-teous.

  He answered, “Half my life.”

  She looked at the tree. Trees can be found, sometimes, not quite discarded, not quite forgotten, potted in rusty gallon cans in not quite successful nurseries, unsold because they are shaped oddly or have dead branches here and there, or because they have grown too slowly in whole or part. These are the ones which develop inter-esting trunks and a resistance to misfortune that makes them flourish if given the least excuse for living. This one was far older than half this man’s life, or all of it. Looking at it. She was terrified by the unbidden thought that a fire, a family of squirrels, some subterranean worm or termite could end this beauty—something working outside any concept of rightness or justice or of respect.

  She looked at the tree. She looked at the man.

  “Coming?”

  “Yes,” she said and went with him into his laboratory.

  “Sit down over there and relax,” he told her. “This might take a little while.”

  “Over there” was a big leather chair by the bookcase.

  The books were right across the spectrum—reference works in medicine and engineering, nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, psychiatry. Also tennis, gymnastics, chess, the oriental war game Go, and golf. And then drama, the techniques of fiction. Modern English Usage, The American Language and suppleme
nt. Wood’s and Walker’s Rhyming Dictionaries and an array of other dictionaries and encyclopedias. A whole long shelf of biographies.

  “You have quite a library.”

  He answered her rather shortly—clearly he did not want to talk just now, for he was very busy.

  He said only, “Yes I have—perhaps you’ll see it some time” which left her to pick away at his words to find out what on earth he meant by them.

  He could only have meant, she decided, that the books beside her chair were what he kept handy for his work that his real library was elsewhere. She looked at him with a certain awe.

  And she watched him. She liked the way he moved swiftly, decisively. Clearly he knew what he was doing.

  He used some equipment that she recognized a glass still, titration equipment, a centrifuge. There were two refrigerators, one of which was not a refrigerator at all, for she could see the large indicator on the door. It stood at 70 F. It came to her that a modern refrigerator is perfectly adaptable to the demand for controlled environ-ment, even a warm one.

  But all that and the equipment she did not recognize was only furniture. It was the man who was worth watching, the man who kept her occupied so that not once in all the long time she sat there was she tempted toward the bookshelves.

  At last he finished a long sequence at the bench, threw some switches, picked up a tall stool and came over to her. He perched on the stool, hung his heels on the cross-spoke and lay a pair of long brown hands over his knees.

  “Scared.”

  He made it a statement.

  “I suppose I am.”

  “You don’t have to stay.”

  “Considering the alternative” she began bravely but the courage-sound somehow oozed out. “It can’t matter much.”

  “Very sound,” he said almost cheerfully. “I remember when I was a kid there was a fire scare in the apartment house where we lived. It was a wild scramble to get out and my tea-year-old brother found himself outside in the street with an alarm clock in his hand. It was an old one and it didn’t workbut of all the things in the place he might have snatched up at a time like that, it turned out to be ‘the clock. He’s never been able to figure out why.”

  “Have you?”

  “Not why he picked that particular thing—no. But I think I know why he did something obviously irrational.

  You see, panic is a very special state. Like fear and flight, or fury and attack, it’s a pretty primitive reaction to extreme danger. It’s one of the expressions of the will to survive. What makes it so special is that it’s irrational.

  Now, why would the abandonment of reason be a survival mechanism?”

  She thought about this seriously. There was that about this man which made serious thought imperative.

  “I can’t imagine,” she said finally. “Unless it’s ‘because, in some situations, reason just doesn’t work.”

  “You can’t imagine,” he said, again radiating that huge approval, making her glow. “And you just did. If you are in danger and you try reason and reason doesn’t work you abandon it. You can’t say it’s unintelligent to abandon what doesn’t work, right? So then you are in panic. You start to perform random acts. Most of them—far and away most will be useless. Some might even be danger-ous. But that doesn’t matter—you’re in danger already.

  Where the survival factor comes in is that away down deep you know that one chance in a million is better than no chance at all. So—here you sit—you’re scared and you could run. Something says you should run but you won’t.”

  She nodded.

  He went on: “You found a lump. You went to a doctor and he made some tests and gave you the bad news.

  Maybe you went to another doctor and he confirmed it.

  You then did some research and found out what was to happen next—the exploratory, the radical, the question-able recovery, the whole long agonizing procedure of being what they call a terminal case. You then flipped out. Did some things you hope I won’t ask you about.

  Took a trip somewhere, anywhere, wound up in my orchard for no reason.” He spread the good hands and let them go back to their kind of sleep. “Panic. The reason for little boys in their pajamas standing at midnight with a broken alarm clock in their arms and for the existence of quacks.” Something chimed over on the bench and he gave her a quick smile and went back to work, saying over his shoulder, “I’m not a quack, by the way. To qual-ify as a quack you have to claim to be a doctor. I don’t.”

  She watched him switch off, switch on, stir, measure and calculate. A little orchestra of equipment chorused and soloed around him as he conducted, whirring, hissing, clicking, flickering. She wanted to laugh, to cry and to scream. She did not one of these things for fear of not stopping, ever.

  When he came over again, the conflict was not raging within her but was exerting steady and opposed tensions.

  The result was a terrible stasis and all she could do when she saw the instrument in his hand was to widen her eyes.

  She quite forgot to breathe.

  “Yes, it’s a needle,” he said, his tone almost bantering.

  “A long shiny sharp needle. Don’t tell me you are one of those needle-shy people.” He flipped the long power cord that trailed from the black housing around the hypodermic to get some slack, straddled the stool. “Want something to steady your nerves?”

  She was afraid to speak. The membrane containing her sane self was very thin, stretched very tight.

  He said, “I’d rather you didn’t, because this pharma-ceutical stew is complex enough as it is. But if you need it”

  She managed to shake her head a little and again felt the wave of approval from him. There were a thousand questions she wanted to ask—had meant to ask—needed to ask. What was in the needle? How many treatments must she have? What would they be like? How long must she stay and where? And most of all-oh, could she live, could she live?

  II

  He seemed concerned with the answer to only one of these.

  “It’s mostly built around an isotope of potassium. If I told you all I know about it and how I came on it in the first place it would take—well, more time than we’ve got. But here’s the general idea. Theoretically, every atom is electrically balanced—never mind ordinary exceptions.

  Likewise all electrical charges in the molecule are supposed to be balanced—so much plus, so much minus, total zero. I happened on the fact that ‘the balance of charges in a wild cell is not zero—not quite. It’s as if there were a submicroscopic thunderstorm going on at ‘the molecular level, with little lightning bolts flashing back and forth and changing the signs. Interfering with oommu-nications-static—and that,” he said, gesturing with the shielded hypo in his hand, “is what this is all about.

  When something interferes with communications—especially the RNA mechanism that says. Read this blueprint, build accordingly and stop when it’s done—when that message gets garbled lopsided things get built. Off balance things. Things that do almost what they should, do it almost right-they’re wild cells and the messages they pass on are even worse.

  “Okay. Whether these thunderstorms are caused by viruses or chemicals or radiation or physical ‘trauma or even anxiety and don’t think anxiety can’t do—it is secondary. The important thing is to fix it so the thunderstorm can’t happen. If you can do that the cells have plenty of ability all by themselves to repair and replace what’s gone wrong. And biological systems aren’t like ping-pong balls with static charges waiting for the charge to leak away or to discharge into a grounded wire. They have a kind of resilience—I call it forgiveness—that enables them to take on a little more charge, or a little less, and do all right. Well, then say a certain clump of cells is wild and say it carries an aggregate of a hundred units extra on the positive side. Cells immediately around it are affected but not the next layer or the next.

  “If they could be opened to the extra charge if they could help to drain it off they would, well, cure the wild cells o
f the surplus. You see what I mean? And they would be able to handle that little overage themselves or pass it on to other cells and still others who could deal with it. In other words, if I can flood your body with a medium that can drain off and distribute a concentration of this unbalanced charge, the ordinary bodily processes will be free to move in and clear up the wild-cell damage.

  And that’s what I have here.”

  He held the shielded needle between his knees and from a side pocket of his lab coat he took a plastic box, opened it and drew out an alcohol swab. Still cheerfully talking, he took her terror-numbed arm and scrubbed at the inside of her elbow.

  “I am not for one second implying that nuclear charges in the atom are the same thing as static electricity. They’re in a different league altogether. But the analogy holds. I could use another analogy. I could liken the charge in the wild cells to accumulations of fat. And this gunk of mine to a detergent that would break it up and spread it so far it couldn’t be detected any more. But I’m led to the static analogy by an odd side effect organisms injected with this stuff do build up one hell of a static charge. It’s a byproduct and, for reasons I can only theorize about at the moment, it seems to be keyed to the audio spectrum. Tuning forks and the like. That’s what I was playing with when I met you. That tree is drenched with this stuff. It used to have a whorl of wild-cell growth. It hasn’t any more.”

  He gave her the quick, surprising ‘smile and let it flicker away as he held the needle point upward and squirted it. With his other hand wrapped around her left bicep he squeezed gently and firmly. The needle was lowered and placed and slid into the big vein so deftly that she gasped not because it hurt but because it did not. Attentively he watched the bit of glass barrel pro-truding from the black housing as he withdrew the plunger a fraction and saw the puff of red into the color-less fluid inside.

  Then he bore steadily on the plunger again.

  “Please don’t move. I’m sorry, this will take a little time. I have to get quite a lot of this into you. Which is fine, you know,” he said, resuming the tone of his previous remarks about audio spectra, “because side effect or no, it’s consistent. Healthy bio systems develop a strong electrostatic field, unhealthy ones a weak one or none at all. With an instrument as primitive and simple as that little electroscope you can tell if any part of the organism has a community of wild cells and if so, where it is and how big and how wild.” Deftly he shifted his grip on .the encased hypodermic without moving the point or varying the plunger pressure. It was beginning to be uncomfortable an ache turning into a bruise. “And if you’re wondering why this mosquito has a housing on it with a wire attached (although I’ll bet you’re not and that you know as well as I do that I’m doing all this talking just to keep your mind occupied) I’ll tell you.