A Saucer of Loneliness (50 page)

So she lived and outwardly prospered. She met some humans who amused her briefly, and others she avoided after one or two meetings because they reminded her so painfully of her own people—a smile, a stride, a matching of colors. If she met any others with the terrifying quality of the woman in the car, she was not aware of it; that part of her defense, at least, was secure.

But the torture still poured down upon her, and after half a year she knew she must take some steps to counteract it. At base, the solution was simple. If she did nothing, the torture would crush her, and there was no surcease in that, for having broken, she would go on suffering it. She could kill herself, but that in itself would fulfill the terms of her sentence—“life imprisonment—with torture.” There was only one way—to be killed, and to be killed by the guardians. She was not under a death sentence. If she forced one, they would have; to violate their own penalty, and she would be able to die unbroken, as befits a Citizen of the Fountain Itself.

More and more she studied the sky, knowing of the undetectible presence of the guardians and their killer-boats, knowing that if she could think of it, there must be a way to bring one of them careening silently down on her to snuff her out. She made sendings of many kinds—even of the kind she had used to extinguish the life-force of the Preceptor—without altering the quality or degree of torture in the slightest.

Perhaps the guardians sent, but did not receive; perhaps nothing could touch them. Geared to the pattern of a Citizen’s mind and conditioning, they patiently produced that which must, in time, destroy it. The destruction would be because of the weakness of the attacked. Drusilla wanted to be destroyed through the strength of the attacker. The distinction was, to her, clear and vital.

There had to be a way, if only she could think of it.

There was, and she did.

He came onstage grinning like a boy, swinging his guitar carelessly.
The set was a living room. He plumped down on a one-armed easy-chair and hooked a brown-and-white hassock toward him with his heel. There was applause.

“Thank you, Mother,” said Chan Behringer. He slipped the plectrum from under the first and second strings. Dru thought
Your low D is one one-hundred-twenty-eighth tone sharp
.

Deftly, out of sight of the audience, he plugged in the pickup cable. Dru watched attentively. She had never seen a twelve-string guitar before.

He began to play. He played competently, with neither mistakes nor imagination. There was a five-stage amplifier built into his chair and a foot-pedal tone control and electronic vibrato in the hassock. A rough cutoff at twenty-seven thousand cycles, she realized, and then remembered that, to most humans, response flat to eight thousand is high fidelity.

She was immensely pleased with the electrical pickups; she had not noticed them at first, which was a compliment to him. One was magnetic, sunk into the fingerboard at the fourteenth fret. The other was a contact microphone, obviously inside the box, directly under the bridge. The either-or-both switch was audible when he moved it, which she thought disgraceful.

He finished his number, drawled a few lines of patter, asked for and played a couple of requests and an encore, by which time Drusilla had left the theater and was talking to the stage doorman. He took the paper parcel she handed him and sent it to the dressing rooms via the callboy.

In a matter of seconds, there was a wild whoop from backstage and Chan Behringer came bounding down the iron steps, clutching a wild flannel shirt, a pair of blue dungarees, and some tatters of paper and string.

“Dru! Dru!” he gasped. He ran to her, his arms out. Then he stopped, faltered, put his head very slightly to one side. “Dru,” he said again, softly.

“Hello, Chan.”

“I never thought I’d see you again.”

“I had to return your things.”

“Too good to be true,” he murmured. “I—we—” Suddenly he turned to the goggling doorman and tossed the clothes to him. “Hang on to these for me, will you, George?” To Drusilla he said, “I should take ’em backstage, but I’m afraid to let you out of my sight.”

“I won’t run away again.”

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. He took her arm, and again there was the old echo of a shock he had once felt at the touch of her flesh through fabric.

They went to a place, all soft lights and leather, and they talked about the beach and the city and show business and guitar music, but not about her strange fury with him the morning she had stalked out of his life.

“You’ve changed,” he said at length.

“Have I?”

“You were like—like a queen before. Now you’re like a princess.”

“That’s sweet.”

“More … human.”

She laughed. “I wasn’t exactly human when you first met me. I’d had a bad time. I’m all right now, Chan. I—didn’t want to see you until I was all right.”

They talked until it was time for his next act, and after that they had dinner.

She saw him the next day, and the next.

The chubby man with a face like a cobbler and hands like a surgeon made the most beautiful guitars in the world. He sprang to his feet when the tall girl came in. It was the first time he had paid such a courtesy in fourteen years.

“Can you cut an F-slot that looks like this?” she demanded.

He looked at the drawing she laid on the counter, grunted, then said, “Sure, lady. But why?”

She launched into a discussion which, at first, he did not hear, for it was in his field and in his language and he was too astonished to think. But once into it, he very rapidly learned things about resonance, harmonic reinforcement, woods, varnishes and reverse-cantilever designs that were in no book he had ever heard about.

When she left a few minutes later, he hung gasping to the counter. In front of him was a check for work ordered. In his hand was a twenty-dollar bill for silence. In his mind was a flame and a great wonderment.

She spilled a bottle of nail polish remover on Chan’s guitar. He was kind and she was pathetically contrite. It was all right, he said; he knew a place that could retouch it before evening. They went there together. The little man with the cobbler’s face handed over the new instrument, a guitar with startling slots, an ultra-precision bridge, a fingerboard that crept into his hand as if it were alive and loved him. He chorded it once, and at the tone he put it reverently down and stared. His eyes were wet.

“It’s yours,” Drusilla twinkled. “Look—your name inlaid on the neck-back.”

“I know your guitars,” said Chan to the chubby man, “but I never heard of anything like this.”

“Tricks to every trade,” said the man, and winked.

Drusilla slipped him another twenty as they left.

The electronics engineer stared at the schematic diagram. “It won’t work.”

“Yes, it will,” said Drusilla. “Can you build it?”

“Well, gosh, yes, but who ever heard of voltage control like this? Where’s the juice supposed to go from …” He leaned closer. “Well, I’ll be damned. Who designed this?”

“Build it,” she said.

He did. It worked. Drusilla wired it into the prop armchair and Chan never knew anything had been changed. He attributed everything to the new instrument as he became more familiar with it and began to exploit its possibilities. Suddenly there were no more layoffs. No more road trips, either. The clubs began to take important notice of the shy young man with the tear-your-heart-out guitar.

She stole his vitamin pills and replaced them with something else. She invited him to dinner at her apartment and he fainted in the middle of the fish course.

He came to seven hours later on the couch, long after the strange induction baker and the rack of impulse hypodermics had been hidden
away. He remembered absolutely nothing. He was lying on his left arm and it ached.

Dru told him he had fallen asleep and she had just let him sleep it out.

“Poor dear, you’ve been working too hard.”

He told her somewhat harshly that she must
never
let him sleep like that, cutting off the circulation in his fingering arm.

The next day, the arm was worse and he had to cancel a date. On the third day, it was back to normal, one hundred per cent, and on the fourth, fifth, and sixth days it continued to improve. And what it could do on the fingerboard was past description. Which was hardly surprising: there was not another arm on Earth like it, with its heavier nerve-fibers, the quadrupling of the relay-nodes on the medullary sheaths, the low-resistance, super-reactive axones, and the isotopic potassium and sodium which drenched them.

“I don’t play this damn thing any more,” he said. “I just think the stuff and that left hand reads my mind.”

He made three records in three months, and the income from them increased cubically each time. Then the record company decided to save money and put him under a long-term contract at a higher rate than anyone had ever been paid before.

Chan, without consulting Drusilla, bought one of a cluster of very exclusive houses just over the city line. The neighbors on the left were the Kerslers, whose grandfather had made their money in off-the-floor sanitary fixtures. The neighbors on the right were the Mullings you know, Osprey Mullings, the writer, two books a year, year in and year out, three out of four of them making Hollywood.

Chan invited the Kerslers and the Mullings to his housewarming, and took Drusilla out there to surprise her.

She was surprised, all right. Kersler had a huge model railroad in his cellar and his mind likewise contained a great many precise minutiae, only one of which was permitted to operate at a time. Grace Kersler’s mind was like an empty barn solidly lined with pink frosting. Osprey Mullings’ head contained a set of baby’s blocks of limited number, with which he constructed his novels by a ritualistic process of rearrangement. But Luellen Mullings was the bland-faced
confection who secretly chewed bubble gum and who had so jolted Drusilla that day on the beach road.

It was a chatty and charming party, and it was the very first time that humans had been capable of irritating Drusilla so much that she had to absorb the annoyance rather than ignore it. She bore this attack on her waning capacities with extreme graciousness, and at parting, the Kerslers and the Mullings pressed Chan’s hand and wished him luck with that
beautiful
Drusilla Strange, you lucky fellow you.

And late at night, full to bursting with success and security and a fine salting of ambition, Chan drove her back to town and at her apartment, he proposed to her.

She held both his hands and cried a little, and promised to work with him and to help him even more in the future—but, “Please, please, Chan, never ask me that again.”

He was hurt and baffled, but he kept his promise.

Chan studied music seriously now—he never had before. He had to. He was giving concerts rather than performances, and he played every showcase piece ever composed by one virtuoso to madden and frustrate the others. He played all of the famous violin cadenzi on his guitar as well. He made arrangements of the arrangements. He did all this with the light contempt of a Rubinstein examining a two-dollar lesson in chord-vamping. So at length he had no recourse but to compose. Some of his stuff was pretty advanced. All of it took you by the throat and held you.

One Sunday afternoon, “Try this,” said Drusilla. She hummed a tone or two, then burst into a cascade of notes that brought Chan up standing.

“God
, Dru!”

“Try it,” she said.

He got his guitar. His left hand ran over the fingerboard like a perplexed little animal, and he struck a note or two.

“No,” she said, “this.” She sang.

“Oh,” he whispered. Watching her, he played. When she seemed not pleased, he stopped.

“No,” she said. “Chan, I can only sing one note at a time. You have twelve strings.” She paused, thoughtfully,
listening
. “Chan, if I asked you to play that theme, and then to—to paint pictures on it with your guitar, would that make sense?”

“You usually make sense.”

She smiled at him. “All right. Play that theme, and with it, play the way a tree grows. Play the way the bud leads the twig and the twig cuts up into space to make a hole for the branch. No,” she said quickly, as his eyes brightened and his right thumb and forefinger tightened on the plectrum, “not yet. There’s more.”

He waited.

She closed her eyes. Almost inaudibly, she hummed something. Then she said, “At the same time, put in all the detail of a tree that has already grown.” She opened her eyes and looked straight at him. “That will consolidate,” she said factually, “because a tree is only the graphic trajectory of its buds.”

He looked at her strangely. “You’re quite a girl.”

“Never mind that,” she said quickly. “Now put those three things together with a fountain. And that’s all.”

“What kind of a fountain?”

She paled, but her voice was easy. “Silly. The only kind of fountain that could
be
with that theme, the tree growing, and the tree grown.”

He struck a chord. “I’ll try.”

She hummed for him, then brought one long forefinger down. He picked up the theme from her voice. He closed his eyes. The guitar, of all instruments the most intimately expressive, given a magic sostenuto by its electronic graft, began to speak.

The theme, the tree growing, the tree grown.

Suddenly, the fountain, too.

What happened then left them both breathless. Music of this nature should never be heard in a cubic volume smaller than its subject.

When the pressured stridency of the music was quite gone, Chan looked at a cracked window pane and then turned to watch a talc-fine trickle of plaster dust stream down from the lintel of the french window.

“Where,” he said, shaken, “did you get
that
little jangle?”

“Thin air, darling,” said Drusilla blithely. “All the time, everywhere, whenever you like. Listen.”

He cocked his head. There was an intense silence. His left hand crept up to the frets and spattered over them. In spite of the fact that he had not touched the strings with his right hand, a structure of sound hung in the room, reinforcing itself, holding, holding … finally dying.