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

  It’s nothing but a coil carrying a high-frequency alternating current. The alternating field sees to it that the fluid is magnetically and electrostatically neutral right from the start.”

  He withdrew the needle suddenly and smoothly, bent an arm and trapped in the inside of her elbow a cotton swab.

  “Nobody ever told me that after a treatment,” she said.

  “What?”

  “No charge,” she said.

  Again that wave of approval, this time with words: “I like your style. How do you feel?”

  She cast about for accurate phrases.

  “Like .the owner of a large sleeping hysteria begging someone not to wake it up.”

  He laughed.

  “In a little while you are going to feel so weird you won’t have ‘time for hysteria.”

  He got up and returned ‘the needle to -the bench, looping up the cable as he went. He turned off the AC

  field and returned with a large glass bowl and a square of plywood. He inverted the bowl on the floor near her and placed the wood on its broad base.

  “I remember something like that,” she said. “When I was in junior high school. They were generating artificial lightning with a—let me see—well, it had a long, endless belt running over pulleys and some little wires scraping on it and a big copper ball on top.”

  “Van de Graaf generator.”

  “Right. And they did all sorts of things with it. But what I specially remember is standing on a piece of wood on a bowl like that and they charged me up with the generator. I didn’t feel much of anything except all my hail stood out from my head. Everyone laughed. I looked like a golliwog. They said I was carrying forty thousand volts.”

  “Good. I’m glad you remember that. This’ll be a little different, though. By roughly another forty thousand.”

  “Oh!”

  “Don’t worry. As long as you’re insulated and as long as grounded or comparatively grounded objects—me, for example—stay well away from you, there won’t be any fireworks.”

  “Are you going to use a generator like that?”

  “Not like that—and I already did. You’re the genera-

  *N

  ror.

  “I’m—oh!” She had raised her hand from the uphol-stered chair arm and there was a crackle of sparks and the faint smell of ozone.

  “You sure are and more than I bought—and quicker.

  Get up.”

  She started up slowly. She finished the maneuver with speed. As her body separated from the chair she was, for a fractional second, seated in a tangle of spitting blue-white threads. They, or she, propelled her a yard and a half away, standing. Literally shocked half out of her wits, she almost fell.

  “Stay on your feet,” he snapped and she recovered, gasping. He stepped back a pace. “Get up on the board.

  Quickly now.”

  She did as she was told, leaving, for the two paces she traveled, two brief footprints of fire. She teetered on the board. Visibly, her hair began to stir.

  “What’s happening to me?” she cried.

  “You’re getting charged after all,” he said jovially but at this point she failed to appreciate the extension of even her own witticism.

  She cried again, “What’s happening to me?”

  “It’s all right,” he said consolingly.

  He went to the bench and turned on a tone generator.

  It moaned deep in the one to three hundred cycle range.

  He increased the volume and turned the pitch control.

  It howled upward and, as it did so, her red-gold hair shivered and swept up and out, each hair attempting frantically to gat away from all the others. He ran the tone up above ten thousand cycles and all the way back to a belly-bumping inaudible eleven. At the extremes her hair slumped but at around eleven hundred it stood out in, as she had described it, golliwog style. She could feel it.

  He turned down the gain to a more or less bearable level and picked up the electroscope. He came toward her, smiling.

  “You are an electroscope, you know that? And a living Van de Graaf generator as well. And a golliwog.”

  “Let me down,” was all she could say.

  “Not yet. Please hang tight. The differential between you and everything else here is so high that if you got near any of it you’d discharge into it. It wouldn’t harm you—it isn’t current electricity—but you might get a burn and a nervous shock out of it.” He held out the electroscope. Even at that distance—and in her distress—she could see the gold leaves writhe apart. He circled her, watching the leaves attentively, moving the instrument forward and back and from side to side. Once he went to the tone generator and turned it down some more.

  “You’re sending such a strong field I can’t pick up the variations,” he explained and returned to her, coming closer now.

  “I can’tmuch more1 can’t,” she murmured.

  He did not hear or he did not care. He ‘moved the electroscope near her abdomen, up and from side to side.

  “Yup. There you are,” he said cheerfully, moving the instrument close to her right breast.

  “What?” she whimpered.

  “Your cancer. Right breast, low, around toward the armpit.” He whistled. “A mean one, too. Malignant as hell.”

  She swayed and then collapsed forward and down. A sick blackness swept down on her, receded explosively in a glare of agonizing blue-white and then crashed down on her like a mountain falling.

  Place where wall meets ceiling. Another wall, another ceiling. Hadn’t seen it before. Didn’t matter. Don’t care.

  Sleep.

  Place where wall meets ceiling. Something in the way.

  His face, close, drawn, tired—eyes awake, though, and penetrating. Doesn’t matter. Don’t care.

  Sleep.

  Place where wall meets ceiling. Down a bit, late sun-light. Over a little, rusty-gold chrysanthemums in a gold-green glass cornucopia. Something in the way again—his face.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Yes, but don’t answer. Don’t move. Don’t speak.

  Sleep.

  It’s a room, a wall, a table, a man pacing—a nighttime window and mums you’d think were alive but don’t you know they’re cut right off and dying?

  Do they know that?

  “How are you?”

  Urgent, urgent.

  “Thirsty.”

  Cold and a bite to it that aches the hinges of ‘the jaws.

  Grapefruit juice. Lying back on his arm while he holds the glass in the other hand.

  O/i, no, that’s not …

  “Thank you. Thanks very”

  Try to sit up. The sheet—my clothes!

  “Sorry about that,” he said, the mind—reader-almost-

  “Some things that have to be done just aren’t consistent with pantyhose and a minidress. All washed and dried and ready for you, though—any time. Over there.”

  The brown wool and the pantyhose and the shoes, on the chair.

  He’s respectful, standing back, putting the glass next to an insulated carafe on the night table.

  “What things?”

  “Throwing up. Bedpans,” he said candidly.

  Protective with the sheet, which can hide bodies bat Oh—not embarrassment.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Oh. I must have”

  Shake head and he slides back and forth in the vision.

  “You went into shock and then you just didn’t come out of it.”

  He hesitated. It was the first time she had ever seen him hesitate over anything. She became for a moment an almost-mindreader.

  Should I tell her what’s in my mind?

  Sure, he should. And he did.

  “You didn’t want to come out of it.”

  “It’s all gone out of my head.”

  “The pear tree, the electroscope. The injection, the electrostatic response.”

  “No,” she said, not knowing. Then, knowing: “No!”

  “Hang on,” he rapp
ed and next thing she knew he was by the bed, over her, his two hands hard on her cheeks.

  “Don’t slip off again. You can handle it. You can handle it because it’s all right now, do you understand that?

  You’re all right.”

  “You told me I had cancer.”

  She sounded pouty, accusing.

  He laughed at her, actually laughed.

  “You told me you had it.”

  “Oh, but I didn’t know.”

  “That explains it, then,” he said in a load-off-my-baok tone. “There wasn’t anything in what I did that could cause a three-day withdrawal like that. It had to be something in you.”

  “Three days!”

  He simply nodded and went on with what he was saying.

  “I get a little pompous once in awhile,” he said en-gagingly. “Comes from being right so much of the time.

  Took a bit more for granted than I should have, didn’t I?

  When I assumed you’d been to a doctor, maybe even had a biopsy? You hadn’t, had you?”

  “I was afraid,” she admitted. She looked at him. “My mother died of it—and my aunt—and my sister had a radical mastectomy. I couldn’t bear it. And when you”

  “When I told you what you already knew and what you never wanted to hear—you couldn’t take it. You blacked right out, you know. Fainted away. And it had nothing to do’ with the seventy-odd thousand volts of static you were carrying. I caught you.” He put out his aims where they were, on display, until she looked at them and saw the angry red scorch marks on his fore-arms and heavy biceps, as much of them as she could see from under his short-sleeved shirt. “About nine-tenths knocked me out too,” he said. “But at least you didn’t crack your head or anything.”

  “Thank you,” she said reflexively and then began to cry. “What am .1 going to do?”

  “Do? Go back home, wherever that is—pick up your life again, whatever that might mean.”

  “But you said”

  “When are you going to get it into your head that what I did was not a diagnostic?”

  “Are you—did you—you mean you cured it?”

  “I mean you’re curing it right now. I explained it all to you ‘before. You remember that now, don’t you?”

  “Not altogether but—yes.” Surreptitiously (but not enough, because he saw her) she felt under it—he sheet for the lump. “It’s still there.”

  “If I bopped you over the head with a bat,” he said with slightly exaggerated simplicity, “there would be a lump on it. It would be there tomorrow and the next day.

  The day after that it might be smaller. In a week you’d still be able to feel it but it would be gone. Same thing here.”

  At last she let the enormity of it touch her. “A one-shot cure for cancer”

  “Oh, God,” he said harshly. “I can tell by looking at you that I am going to have to listen to that speech again.

  Well, I won’t.”

  Startled, she asked, “What speech?”

  “The ‘one about my duty to humanity. It comes in two phases and many textures. Phase one has to do with my duty to humanity and really means we could make a classic buck with it. Phase two deals solely with my duty to humanity and I don’t hear that one very often. Phase two utterly overlooks the reluctance humanity has to accept good things unless they arrive from accepted and respectable sources. Phase one is fully aware of this but gets rat shrewd in figuring ways around it.”

  She said, “I don’t” but could get no farther.

  “The textures,” he overrode her, “are accompanied by the light of revelation, with or without religion and/or mysticism. Or they are cast sternly in the ethical-philoso-phy mold and aim to force me to surrender through guilt mixed—to some degree all the way up to total—with compassion.”

  “But I only”

  “You,” he said, aiming a long index finger at her, “have robbed yourself of the choicest example of everything I have just said. If my assumptions had been right and you had gone to your friendly local sawbones—and he had diagnosed cancer and referred you to a specialist and he had done likewise and sent you to a colleague for consultation and, in random panic, you had fallen into my hands and been cured—and had gone back to your various doctors to report a miracle, do you know what you’d have gotten from them? ‘Spontaneous remission,’ that’s what you’d have gotten. And it wouldn’t be only doctors,” he went on with a sudden renewal of passion, under which she quailed in her bed. “Everybody has his own commercial. Your nutritionist would have nodded over his wheat germ or his macrobiotic rice cakes, your priest would have dropped to his knees and looked at the sky, your geneticist would have a pet theory about generation-skipping and would assure you that your grandparents probably had spontaneous remissions, too, and never knew it.”

  “Please!” she cried but he shouted at her..

  “Do you know what I am? I am an engineer twice over, mechanical and electrical—and I have a law degree.

  If you were foolish enough to tell anyone about what has happened here (which I hope you aren’t—but if you are I know how to protect myself) I could be jailed for prac-ticing medicine without a license. You could have me up for assault because I stuck a needle into you and even for kidnapping if you could prove I carried you in here from the lab. Nobody would give a damn that I had cured your cancer. You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “No. I don’t even know your name.”

  “And I won’t tell you. I don’t know your name either”

  “Oh! It’s”

  “Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me! I don’t want to hear it. I wanted to be involved with your lump and I was.

  I want it and you to be gone as soon as you’re both up to it. Have I made myself absolutely clear?”

  “Just let me get dressed,” she said tightly, “and I’ll leave right now.”

  “Without making a speech?”

  “Without making a speech.” And in a flash her anger turned to misery and she added: “I was going to say I was grateful. Would that have been all right, sir!”

  And his anger underwent a change too, for he came close to the bed and sat down on his heel, bringing their faces to a level, and said quite gently, “That would be fine. Although you won’t really be grateful for another ten days, when you get your ‘spontaneous remission’ reports—or maybe for six months or a year or two or five, when examinations keep on testing out negative.”

  She detected such a wealth of sadness behind this that she found herself reaching for the hand with which he steadied himself against the edge of the bed. He did not recoil but he didn’t seem to welcome her touch either.

  “Why can’t I be grateful right now?”

  “That would be an act of faith,” he said bitterly, “and that just doesn’t happen any more—if it ever did.” He rose and went toward the door. “Please don’t go tonight,” he said. “It’s dark and you don’t know the way. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  When he came back in the morning the door was open.

  The bed was made and the sheets were folded neatly on the chair, together with the pillow slips and the towels she had used. She wasn’t there.

  He came out into the entrance court and contemplated his bonsai.

  Early sun gold-frosted the horizontal upper foliage of the old tree and brought its gnarled limbs into sharp re-lief, tough brown-gray creviced in velvet. Only the companion of a bonsai (there are owners of bonsai but they are a lesser breed) fully understands the relationship.

  There is an exclusive and individual treeness to the tree because it is a living thing and living things change—and there are definite ways in which the tree desires to change.

  A man sees the tree and in his mind makes certain extensions and extrapolations of what he sees and sets about making them happen. The tree in turn will do only what a tree can do, will resist to the death any attempt to do what it cannot do or to do in less time than it needs.

  The shaping of a bonsai is
therefore always a com-promise and always a cooperation. A man cannot create bonsai, nor can a tree. It takes both and they must understand one another. It takes a long time to do that. One memorizes one’s bonsai, every twig, the angle of every crevice and needle and, lying awake at night or in a pause a thousand miles away, one recalls this or that line or mass, one makes one’s plans. With wire and water and light, with tilting and with the planting of water-robbing weeds or heavy, root-shading ground cover, one explains to the tree what one wants. And if the explanation is well enough made and there is great enough understanding the tree will respond and obey—almost.

  Always there will be its own self-respecting highly individual variation. Very well, I shall do what you want, but I will do it -my way. And for these variations the tree is always willing to present a clear and logical explanation and, more often than not (almost smiling), it will make clear to the man that he could have avoided it if his understanding had been better.

  It is the slowest sculpture in the world, and there is, at times, doubt as to which is being sculpted, man or tree.

  So he stood for perhaps ten minutes, watching the flow of gold over the upper branches, and then went to a carved wooden chest, opened it, shook out a length of disreputable cotton duck. He opened the hinged glass at one side of the atrium and spread the canvas over the roots ‘and all ‘the earth to one side of the trunk, leaving the rest open to wind and water. Perhaps in a while—a month or two—a certain shoot in the topmost branch would take the hint and the uneven flow of moisture up through the cambium layer would nudge it away from that upward reach and persuade it to continue the horizontal passage. And perhaps not—and it would need the harsher language of binding and wire. But then it might have something to say, too, about the rightness of an upward trend and would perhaps say it persuasively enough to convince the man—altogether, a patient, meaningful, and rewarding dialogue.