A Saucer of Loneliness (51 page)

“That it?” he asked, awed.

She held up a thumb and forefinger very close together. “About so much of it.”

“How come I never heard it before?”

“You weren’t ready.”

His eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Damn it, Drusilla … you’re—you’ve done … Oh, hell, I don’t know, I love you so much.”

She touched his face. “Shh. Play for me, Chan.”

He breathed hard, thickly. “Not in here.”

He put down his guitar and went to get the portable amplifier. They set it upon the rolling lawn and plugged in the guitar. Chan held the instrument for a silent moment, sliding his hand over its polished flank. He looked up suddenly and met Drusilla’s eyes. Chan’s face twisted, for her ecstasy and gaiety and triumph added up to something very like despair, and he did not understand.

He would have thrown down the guitar then, for his heart was full of her, but she backed away, shaking her head lightly, and bent to the amplifier to switch it on. Her fingers pulled at the rotary switch as she turned it, and only she knew the nature of the mighty little transmitter that began to warm up along with the audio. She moved back still further; she did not want to be close to him when it—happened.

He watched her for a moment, then looked down at the guitar. He watched his four enchanted left fingers hook and hover over the fingerboard; he looked at them with a vast puzzlement that slowly turned to raptness. He began to sway gently.

Drusilla stood tall and taut, looking past him to the trees, to the scudding clouds and beyond. She dropped her shields and let the music pour in. And from the guitar came a note, another, two together,
a strange chord.
For this I shall be killed
, she thought. To bring to the mighty scorn her people had of Earth and all things Earthly, this molded savage who could commune like a Citizen … this was the greatest affront.

A foam of music fell and feathered and rushed inward to the Fountainhead Itself, and every voice of it smashed and hurtled upward. The paired sixth strings of the guitar flung up with them in a bullroar
glissando
that broke and spread glistening all over the keyboard, falling and falling away from a brittle high spatter of doubled first strings struck just barely below the bridge, metallic and needly; and if those taut strings were tied to a listener’s teeth, they could not be more intimate and shocking.

The unique sound box found itself in sudden shrill resonance, and it woke the dark strings, the deep and mighty ones. They thrummed and sang without being touched; and Chan’s inhuman fingers found a figure in the middle register, folded it in on itself, broke it in two, and the broken pieces danced … and still the untouched strings hummed and droned, first one loud and then another as the resonances altered and responded.

And all at once the air was filled with the sharp and dusty smell of ozone.

With it all, the music, hers and Chan’s, settled itself down and down like some dark giant, pressing and sweeping and gathering in its drapes and folds as it descended to rest, to collect its roaring and crooning and tittering belongings all together that they may be pieced and piled and understood; until at last the monster was settled and neat, leaving a looming bulk of silence and an undertone of pumping life and multi-level quiet stripes of contemplation. The whole structure breathed, slowly and more slowly, held its breath, let a tension develop, rising, painful, agonizing, intolerable …

“Play Red River Valley, hey, Chan?”

Drusilla gasped, and the ozone rasped her throat. Chan’s fingers faltered, stopped. He half-turned, with a small, interrogative whimper.

Standing on the other side of the far hedge, near her house, was
Luellen Mullings, her doll-figure foiled like a glass diamond in a negligible playsuit, her golden hair free, her perfect jaw busy on her sticky cud.

There was born in Drusilla a fury more feral, more concentrated, than any power of muscle or mind she had ever conceived of. Luellen Mullings, essence of all the degradation Earth was known for, all the cheapness, shallowness, ignorance and stupidity. She was the belch in the cathedral; she would befoul the Fountain Itself.

“Hi, Dru, honey. Didn’t see you. Hey, I saw a feller at the Palace could play guitar holding it behind his back.” She sniffed. “What’s that funny smell? Like lightning or something.”

“Get back in your house, you cheap little slut,” Drusilla hissed.

“Hey, who you calling—” Luellen dipped down and picked up a smooth white stone twice the size of her fist. She raised it. Even Drusilla’s advanced reflexes were not fast enough to anticipate what she did. The stone left her hand like a bullet. Drusilla braced herself—but the stone did not come to her. It struck Chan just behind the ear. He pivoted on his heel three-quarters of a revolution, and quietly collapsed on the grass, the guitar nestling down against him like a loving cat.

“Now look at what you made me do!” Luellen cried shrilly.

Drusilla uttered a harpy’s scream and bounded across the lawn, her long hands spread out like talons. Luellen watched her come, round-eyed.

There is a force in steady eyes by which a tiger may be made to turn away. It can make a strong man turn and run. There is a way to gather this force into a deadly nubbin and hurl it like a grenade. Drusilla knew how to do this, for she had done it before; she had killed with it. But the force she hurled at Luellen Mullings now was ten times what she had dealt the Preceptor.

For a moment, the Universe went black, and then Drusilla became aware of a pressure on her face. There was another sensation, systemic, pervasive. Her legs, her arms, were weighted and tingly, and she seemed to have no torso at all.

She gradually understood the sensation on her face. Moist earth
and grass. She was lying on her stomach on the lawn. She absorbed this knowledge as if it were a complicated matrix of ideas which, if comprehended, might lead to hitherto unheard-of information. At last she realized what was wrong with her body. Oxygen starvation. She began to breathe again, hard, painful gasps, inflations that threatened to burst the pulmonary capillaries, exhalations that brought her diaphragm upward until it crushed in panic against the pounding cardium.

She moved feebly, pulled a limp hand toward her, rested a moment with it flat on the grass near her shoulder. She began to press herself upward weakly, failed, rested a moment, and tried again. At last she raised herself to a sitting position.

Chan lay where he had fallen, still as death, guitar nearby.

Pop!

Drusilla looked up. Over the hedge, like an artificial flower, nodded Luellen’s bright head. The quick deft tongue was retrieving the detritus of a broken bubble.

Drusilla snarled and formed another bolt, and as it left her something like a huge soft mallet seemed to descend on her shoulder blades. Seated as she was, it folded her down until her chest struck the ground. Her hip joints crackled noisily. She writhed, straightened out, lay on her side gasping.

Pop!

Drusilla did not look up.

Presently she heard Luellen’s light footsteps retreating down the gravel path. She gave herself over to a wave of weakness, and relaxed completely to let the strength flow back.

Shh … shh … approaching footsteps.

Drusilla rolled over and sat up again. Her head felt simultaneously pressured and fragile, as if any sudden move would make it burst like a faulty boiler. She turned pain-blinded eyes to the footsteps. When the jagged ache receded, she saw Luellen sauntering toward her on this side of the hedge, swinging her hips, humming tunelessly.

“Feeling better, honey?”

Drusilla glared at her. The killer-bolt began to form again. Luellen
sank gracefully to the grass, near but not too near, and chose a grass-stem to pull up.

“I wouldn’t if I were you, hon,” she said pleasantly. “I can keep this up all day. You’re just knocking yourself out.”

She regarded the grass stem thoughtfully from her wide vacant eyes, poked out a membrane of gum, hesitated a moment, and drew it back in without blowing a bubble. The gum clicked wetly twice as she worked it.

“
Damn
you,” said Drusilla devoutly.

Luellen giggled. Drusilla struggled upward, leaned heavily on one arm, and glared. Luellen said, without looking at her, “That’s far enough, sweetie.”

“Who are you?” Drusilla whispered.

“Home makuh,” said Luellen, with a trace of Bronx accent. “Leisure class type home makuh.”

“You know what I mean,” Drusilla growled.

“Whyn’t you look and see?”

Drusilla curled her lip.

“Don’t want to get your pretty probes dirty, huh? Know what you are? You’re a snob.”

“A—a what?”

“Snob,” said Luellen. She stretched prettily. “Just too good for
anybody
. Too good for him.”

She pointed to Chan with a gesture of her head. “Or me.” She shrugged. “
Any
body.”

Drusilla glanced at Chan and probed anxiously.

“He’s all right,” said Luellen. “Just unplugged.”

Drusilla swung her attention back to the other girl. Reluctantly she dropped her automatic shield and reached out with her mind.
What are you?

Luellen put her hands out, palms forward. “Not that way. I don’t do that any more. Look if you want to, but if you want to talk to me, talk out loud.”

Drusilla probed. “A criminal!” she said finally, in profound disgust.

“Sisters under the skin,” said Luellen. She popped her gum. Drusilla shuddered. Luellen said, “Tell you what I did.”

“I’m not interested.”

“Tell you, anyway. Listen,” Luellen said suddenly, “you know if you try to do anything to me, you’ll go flat on your bustle. Well, the same thing applies if you don’t listen to me. Hear?”

Drusilla dropped her eyes and was furiously silent. Reluctantly she realized that this creature could do exactly as she said.

“I’m not asking you to like it,” Luellen said more gently. “Just listen, that’s all.”

She waited a moment, and when Drusilla offered nothing, she said, “What I did, I climbed over the wall at school.”

Drusilla gasped. “You went outside?”

Luellen rolled over onto her stomach and propped herself on her elbows. She pulled another blade of grass and broke it. “Something funny happened to me. You know the feeling-picture about jumping?”

Drusilla recognized it instantly, the sweet, strong, breathless sensation of being strong and leaping from soft grass, floating? landing lithely.

“You do,” said Luellen, glancing at Drusilla’s face. “Well, I was having that picture one fine morning when it—
stuck
. I mean like one of the phonograph records here when it gets stuck. There I was feeling a jump. Just off the ground, and it all froze.”

She laughed a little. “I was real scared. After a while, it started again. I went and asked my tutor about it. She got all upset and went to the Preceptor. He called me in and there was no end of hassle about it.” Again she laughed. “I’d have forgotten the whole thing if he hadn’t made such a fuss. He wanted me to forget it in the
worst
way. Tried to make me think it happened because there was something wrong with me.

“So I got to thinking about it. When you do that, you start looking pretty carefully at
all
the pictures. And you know, they’re full of scratches and flaws, if you look.

“But all the time they were teaching us that this was the world
over the Wall—perfect green grass, beautiful men, the fountain and the falls and all the rest of it, that we were supposed to graduate to when the time came. I wondered so much that I wouldn’t wait any more. So I went over the wall. They caught me and sent me here.”

“I don’t wonder,” said Drusilla primly.

Luellen put pink fingers to her lips, hauled the gum out almost to arm’s length, and chewed it back in as she talked. “And all you did was knock off the Preceptor!”

Drusilla winced and said nothing.

Luellen said, “You been here about two years, right? How many of us prisoners have you run into?”

“None!” said Drusilla, with something like indignation. “I wouldn’t have anything to do with—” She clamped her lips tight and snorted through her nostrils. “Will you
stop
that giggling?”

“I can’t help it,” said Luellen. “It’s part of the pattern for home makuhs. All home makuhs giggle.”

“… And that voice!”

“That’s part of the pattern too, hon,” said Luellen. “How do you think I’d go over at the canasta table if I weren’t a-flutter and a-twitter, all coos and sighs and gentle breathings? My God, the girls’d be scared right out of their home permanents!” She tittered violently.

“Again!” Drusilla winced.

“You might as well get used to it, hon. I had to. You’ll be doing something equally atrocious yourself, pretty soon. It goes under the head of camouflage … Look, I’ll stop fooling around. There’s a couple of hard truths you have to get next to. I know what you did. You set up a reflex to blank out any ex-Citizen you might meet. Right?”

“One must keep oneself decent,” insisted Drusilla.

Luellen shook her head wonderingly. “You’re just dumb, girl. I don’t like you, but I have to be sorry for you.”

“I don’t need your pity!”

“Yes, you do. You’ve been asleep for a whole lot of years and you just have to snap out of it.” Luellen knelt and sat back on her heels. “Tell me—up to the time they shipped you here, where did you go?”

“You know perfectly well. The Great Hall. My garden. My dormitory. That’s all.”

“Um-hmm. That’s all. And every minute since you were born, you’ve been conditioned: a Citizen is the finest flower of creation. Be a good obedient girl and you’ll gambol on the green for the rest of your life. Meanwhile there are criminals who get sent to prison, and the prison is the lowest cesspool in the Universe where you live out your life being reminded of the glory of the world you lost.”

“Of course, but you make it sound—”

“Did you ever see any of those big muscular beautiful men the pictures told you about? Did you ever see that old-granite and new-grass landscape, or get warm under that nice big sun?”