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 supplement. 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.