A Saucer of Loneliness (11 page)

They were pleased to be chosen for the Dirbanu trip. Rootes felt no remorse at taking away Earth’s new delight, since he was one of the very few who was immune to it. (“Pretty,” he said at his first encounter.) Grunty simply grunted, but then, so did everyone else. Rootes did not notice, and Grunty did not remark upon, the obvious fact that though the loverbirds’ expression of awestruck wonderment
in each other’s presence had, if anything, intensified, their extreme pleasure in Earth and the things of Earth had vanished. They were locked, securely but comfortably, in the after cabin behind a new transparent door, so that their every move could be watched from the main cabin and control console. They sat close, with their arms about one another, and though their radiant joy in the contact never lessened, it was a shadowed pleasure, a lachrymose beauty like the wrenching music of the wailing wall.

The RS drive laid its hand on the moon and they vaulted away. Grunty came up from blackout to find it very quiet. The loverbirds lay still in each other’s arms, looking very human except for the high joining of their closed eyelids, which nictated upward rather than downward like a Terran’s. Rootes sprawled limply on the other couch, and Grunty nodded at the sight. He deeply appreciated the silence, since Rootes had filled the small cabin with earthy chatter about his conquests in port, detail by hairy detail, for two solid hours preceding their departure. It was a routine which Grunty found particularly wearing, partly for its content, which interested him not at all, but mostly for its inevitability. Grunty had long ago noted that these recitations, for all their detail, carried the tones of thirst rather than of satiety. He had his own conclusions about it, and, characteristically, kept them to himself. But inside, his spinning gusts of words could shape themselves well to it, and they did. “And man, she moaned!” Rootes would chant. “And take money? She
gave
me money. And what did I do with it? Why, I bought up some more of the same.”
And what you could buy with a shekel’s worth of tenderness, my prince!
his silent words sang. “… across the floor and around the rug until, by damn, I thought we’re about to climb the wall. Loaded, Grunty-boy, I tell you, I was loaded!”
Poor little one
ran the hushed susurrus,
thy poverty is as great as thy joy and a tenth as great as thine empty noise
. One of Grunty’s greatest pleasures was taken in the fact that this kind of chuntering was limited to the first day out, with barely another word on the varied theme until the next departure, no matter how many months away that might be.
Squeak to me of love, dear mouse
, his words would chuckle.
Stand up on
your cheese and nibble away at your dream
. Then, wearily,
But oh, this treasure I carry is too heavy a burden, in all its fullness, to be so tugged at by your clattering vacuum!

Grunty left the couch and went to the controls. The preset courses checked against the indicators. He logged them and fixed the finder control to locate a certain mass-nexus in the Crab Nebula. It would chime when it was ready. He set the switch for final closing by the push-button beside his couch, and went aft to wait.

He stood watching the loverbirds because there was nothing else for him to do.

They lay quite still, but love so permeated them that their very poses expressed it. Their lax bodies yearned each to each, and the tall one’s hand seemed to stream toward the fingers of his beloved, and then back again, like the riven tatters of a torn fabric straining toward oneness again. And as their mood was a sadness too, so their pose, each and both, together and singly, expressed it, and singly each through the other silently spoke of the loss they had suffered, and how it ensured greater losses to come. Slowly the picture suffused Grunty’s thinking, and his words picked and pierced and smoothed it down and murmured finally,
Brush away the dusting of sadness from the future, bright ones. You’ve sadness enough for now. Grief should live only after it is truly born, and not before
.

His words sang,

and added
Omar Khayyam, born circa 1073
, for this, too, was one of the words’ functions.

And then he stiffened in horror; his great hands came up convulsively and clawed the imprisoning glass …

They were smiling at him.

They were smiling, and on their faces and on and about their bodies there was no sadness.

They had
heard
him!

He glanced convulsively around at the Captain’s unconscious form, then back to the loverbirds.

That they should recover so swiftly from blackout was, to say the least, an intrusion; for his moments of aloneness were precious and more than precious to Grunty, and would be useless to him under the scrutiny of those jeweled eyes. But that was a minor matter compared to this other thing, this terrible fact that they
heard
.

Telepathic races were not common, but they did exist. And what he was now experiencing was what invariably happened when humans encountered one. He could only send; the loverbirds could only receive. And they
must not
receive him! No one must. No one must know what he was, what he thought. If anyone did, it would be a disaster beyond bearing. It would mean no more flights with Rootes. Which, of course, meant no flights with anyone. And how could he live—where could he go?

He turned back to the loverbirds. His lips were white and drawn back in a snarl of panic and fury. For a blood-thick moment he held their eyes. They drew closer to one another, and together sent him a radiant, anxious, friendly look that made him grind his teeth.

Then, at the console, the finder chimed.

Grunty turned slowly from the transparent door and went to his couch. He lay down and poised his thumb over the push-button.

He
hated
the loverbirds, and there was no joy in him. He pressed the button, the ship slid into a new stasis, and he blacked out.

The time passed.

“Grunty!”

“?”

“You feed them this shift?”

“Nuh.”

“Last shift?”

“Nuh.”

“What the hell’s matter with you, y’big dumb bastich? What you expect them to live on?”

Grunty sent a look of roiling hatred aft. “Love,” he said.

“Feed ’em,” snapped Rootes.

Wordlessly Grunty went about preparing a meal for the prisoners. Rootes stood in the middle of the cabin, his hard small fists on his hips, his gleaming auburn head tilted to one side, and watched every move. “I didn’t used to have to tell you anything,” he growled, half pugnaciously, half worriedly. “You sick?”

Grunty shook his head. He twisted the tops of two cans and set them aside to heat themselves, and took down the water suckers.

“You got it in for those honeymooners or something?”

Grunty averted his face.

“We get them to Dirbanu alive and healthy, hear me? They get sick, you get sick, by God. I’ll see to that. Don’t give me trouble, Grunty. I’ll take it out on you. I never whipped you yet, but I will.”

Grunty carried the tray aft. “You hear me?” Rootes yelled.

Grunty nodded without looking at him. He touched the control and a small communication window slid open in the glass wall. He slid the tray through. The taller loverbird stepped forward and took it eagerly, gracefully, and gave him a dazzling smile of thanks. Grunty growled low in his throat like a carnivore. The loverbird carried the food back to the couch and they began to eat, feeding each other little morsels.

A new stasis, and Grunty came fighting up out of blackness. He sat up abruptly, glanced around the ship. The Captain was sprawled out across the cushions, his compact body and outflung arm forming the poured-out, spring-steel laxness usually seen only in sleeping cats. The loverbirds, even in deep unconsciousness, lay like hardly separate parts of something whole, the small one on the couch, the tall one on the deck, prone, reaching, supplicating.

Grunty snorted and hove to his feet. He crossed the cabin and stood looking down on Rootes.

The hummingbird is a yellowjacket
, said his words,
Buzz and dart, hiss and flash away. Swift and hurtful, hurtful …

He stood for a moment, his great shoulder muscles working one against the other, and his mouth trembled.

He looked at the loverbirds, who were still motionless. His eyes slowly narrowed.

His words tumbled and climbed, and ordered themselves:

And dutifully he added
Samuel Ferguson, born 1810
. He glared at the loverbirds and brought his fist into his palm with a sound like a club on an anthill. They had heard him again, and this time they did not smile, but looked into each other’s eyes and then turned together to regard him, nodding gravely.

Rootes went through Grunty’s books, leafing and casting aside. He had never touched them before. “Buncha crap,” he jeered.
“Garden of the Plynck. Wind in the Willows. Worm Ouroborous
. Kid stuff.”

Grunty lumbered across and patiently gathered up the books the Captain had flung aside, putting them one by one back into their places, stroking them as if they had been bruised.

“Isn’t there nothing in here with pictures?”

Grunty regarded him silently for a moment and then took down a tall volume. The Captain snatched it, leafed through it. “Mountains,” he growled. “Old houses.” He leafed. “Damn boats.” He smashed the book to the deck. “Haven’t you got
any
of what I want?”

Grunty waited attentively.

“Do I have to draw a diagram?” the Captain roared. “Got that ol’ itch, Grunty. You wouldn’t know. I feel like looking at pictures, get what I mean?”

Grunty stared at him, utterly without expression, but deep within him a panic squirmed. The Captain never,
never
behaved like this in mid-voyage. It was going to get worse, he realized. Much worse. And quickly.

He shot the loverbirds a vicious, hate-filled glance. If they weren’t aboard …

There could be no waiting. Not now. Something had to be done. Something …

“Come on, come on,” said Rootes. “Goddlemighty Godfrey, even a deadbutt like you must have
something
for kicks.”

Grunty turned away from him, squeezed his eyes closed for a tortured second, then pulled himself together. He ran his hand over the books, hesitated, and finally brought out a large, heavy one. He handed it to the Captain and went forward to the console. He slumped down there over the file of computer tapes, pretending to be busy.

The Captain sprawled onto Grunty’s couch and opened the book. “Michelangelo, what the hell,” he growled. He grunted, almost like his shipmate. “Statues,” he half-whispered, in withering scorn. But he ogled and leafed at last, and was quiet.

The loverbirds looked at him with a sad tenderness, and then together sent beseeching glances at Grunty’s angry back.

The matrix-pattern for Terra slipped through Grunty’s fingers, and he suddenly tore the tape across, and across again. A filthy place, Terra.
There is nothing
, he thought,
like the conservatism of license
. Given a culture of sybaritics, with an endless choice of mechanical titillations, and you have a people of unbreakable and hidebound formality, a people with few but massive taboos, a shockable, narrow, prissy people obeying the rules—even the rules of their calculated depravities—and protecting their treasured, specialized pruderies. In such a group there are words one may not use for fear of their fanged laughter, colors one may not wear, gestures and intonations one must forego, on pain of being torn to pieces. The rules are complex and absolute, and in such a place one’s heart may not sing lest, through its warm free joyousness, it betray one.

And if you must have joy of such a nature, if you must be free to be your pressured self, then off to space … off to the glittering black loneliness. And let the days go by, and let the time pass, and huddle beneath your impenetrable integument, and wait, and wait, and every once in a long while you will have that moment of lonely consciousness when there is no one around to see; and then it may burst from you and you may dance, or cry, or twist the hair on your head till your eyeballs blaze, or do any of the other things your so unfashionable nature thirstily demands.

It took Grunty half a lifetime to find this freedom: No price would be too great to keep it. Not lives, nor interplanetary diplomacy, nor Earth itself were worth such a frightful loss.

He would lose it if anyone knew, and the loverbirds knew.

He pressed his heavy hands together until the knuckles crackled. Dirbanu, reading it all from the ardent minds of the loverbirds; Dirbanu flashing the news across the stars; the roar of reaction, and then Rootes, Rootes, when the huge and ugly impact washed over him …

So let Dirbanu be offended. Let Terra accuse this ship of fumbling, even of treachery—anything but the withering news the loverbirds had stolen.

Another new stasis, and Grunty’s first thought as he came alive in the silent ship was
It has to be soon
.

He rolled off the couch and glared at the unconscious loverbirds. The helpless loverbirds.

Smash their heads in.

Then Rootes … what to tell Rootes?

The loverbirds attacked him, tried to seize the ship?

He shook his head like a bear in a beehive. Rootes would never believe that. Even if the loverbirds could open the door, which they could not, it was more than ridiculous to imagine those two bright and slender things attacking anyone—especially so rugged and massive an opponent.

Poison? No—there was nothing in the efficient, unfailingly beneficial food stores that might help.