Microcosmic God (58 page)

I have now examined the May 1947 issue of
Argosy
in which “Bianca’s Hands” first apppeared and can confirm that the text is the same as in Sturgeon’s collection
E Pluribus Unicorn
. The introduction to the story in the magazine reads, “It is with pride that
Argosy
presents the prize-winning story in our £250 competition. Its strange imaginative quality and the brilliance of its technique convince us of the author’s sure mastery of the art of short story writing. The sinister and beautiful hands of Bianca will linger long in the memory of all who read this story. We congratulate the winner, Theodore Sturgeon, on a powerful and moving piece of work.”

The editor would appreciate hearing from readers who have information about alternate texts or stories omitted from Sturgeon bibliographies, or who notice errors or omissions in these notes.

H
E OPENED THE
door wide to me. He looked like the kind of man you forget easily because you see so many like him.

“Yes?” But his voice wasn’t one to be forgotten.

“Mr. Samuel Kidder?”

“Yes?” A different intonation, a different attitude. He was a gentleman, and the force of his mind was an aura about him. I said, “I’m a freelance writer, Mr. Kidder. I’ve heard of you and your work and would like to do an article. May I—”

He stood aside. “Certainly. Come in.” I did. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him except to glance around the room and back again, and that was looking at him too, for this was his room, so much of the man himself. A weird place. Stacks of magazine fiction. A pulmotor. Velvet drapes. A platinum cigarette case on the same small table with a hookah, or water pipe. Window-frames like picture frames; windows scattered about the walls like pictures. There were plenty of things in the room, but there was no clutter. The place was different from all other places, but you wouldn’t say it was a crazy place. The place was like the man that way too.

Kidder’s papers had been read before the Geographic Society; the Psychical Society; the Institute for Psychological Research. He was an authority on atomic power; naval architecture; thermodynamics; Romansh literature. And yet he had, as far as anyone could find out, never graduated from any college or university. He had, or claimed, no titles. He was Samuel Kidder.
Mr
. Samuel Kidder. Period.

“What do you want to know, Mr.—”

“Egan,” I said. “Just—who you are, why you do the things you do—you know. I’ll write it. You say it. Just tell me what you’d like to read about yourself in a Sunday supplement.”

“If I did,” said Kidder, smiling, “I’d take up your time in talking about someone else.” He motioned. “However—come on. I’ll show you around.”

I followed him. He flung aside one of the great drapes, stepped into a low doorway behind it. We found ourselves in a huge room with balconies on two sides. Kidder flipped a switch; scarlet light blazed from forty or fifty four-foot squares of plate glass set evenly around the walls. Brilliant as the light was, I could barely make out the features of the man beside me. It looked like hell, and I’m not trying to be funny.

“What is it?” I whispered the question, because I had to. You have to in a church too.

“Just red light with a lot of infrared thrown in,” he said. “They can’t see it. Don’t know when they’re being watched.”

“Who can’t?”

“The ants. Come over here.” We went to the red-lit glass nearest the door. I had to stare for nearly a minute before I realized what I was looking at. An anthill, cross-sectioned, up against the glass. I looked around. The room was lined with them. It was like an aquarium, with ants instead. I made a surprised noise.

“Savages,” said Kidder softly. He lifted a pointed stick from a rack over his head, began using it. “See there? That big black one?”

His pointer indicated a monster black ant which crept slowly along one of the bisected corridors in the anthill.

“Big,” I said, for lack of anything else to say. “What is it—a queen?”

Kidder looked at me and back at the ant. “King,” he said, and I saw his teeth flash redly in the light.

“I never heard of—” He silenced me with a wave of his hand, pointed with the stick. A smaller ant was coming the other way along the corridor.

“He better get out of the way,” breathed Kidder.

He didn’t. The big ant’s antennae whipped out, struck the other’s from side to side. Then he lunged forward, over the small one’s back. His powerful mandibles caught just behind the other’s thorax, sliced through. The king idled on, disappeared up a side corridor.

“And that’s why he’s king,” said Kidder, as he pulled me over to the next window.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Hold on. What’s the idea of all this? What did you mean by ‘king’ ant? I never heard of a king ant!”

“One thing at a time. ‘The idea of all this’ is a study of the mass psychology of my ants. As for the king ant—Yes, I know you never heard of one. These ants are—different. You never heard of one ant attacking another in his own hill, either, did you?”

“No; but then I don’t know very much about ants.”

“Forget everything you know about ants, then. These aren’t really ants, you know. They’re under treatment.” Before I could ask anything more, he was pointing out a clodlike lump of grayish sand in the second ant village.

“The first temple,” he said. “That’s all there is here to differentiate this village from the last. It’s all due to the presence of one ant, too. I call him John. He rates as something of a prophet among the rest. Know why? He is just barely sensitive to red light rays. Heh! He’s—psychic!”

“I think,” I said grimly, “I’ll shut up and learn. Mr. Kidder, all this is Greek to me.”

He laughed. He had a good laugh, which is a rare thing. Keep your ears peeled if you don’t believe it. “You’d find it a little hard to take all in one dose, Mr. Egan. What I meant by saying that these aren’t really ants is about what you’d say about the guinea pigs they tried insulin shock on. They weren’t normal guinea pigs, with normal appetites and normal actions. They were temporarily something different. So with my ants, although my particular treatment is a far, far cry from insulin. About John here, my psychic ant. Watch him.”

There was a great deal of activity around the clod Kidder had designated as a temple. By accident or design, one whole wall of it was formed by the glass, so it was easy enough to see everything that went on. A five-legged ant was holding off swarms of others who crowded in. As we watched the throng quieted down, seemed to be watching intently. The five-legged one turned around, facing us, and spread out his legs so that his quarter-inch black body lay on the floor of the temple.

“Watch the others,” murmured Kidder. I did. One by one they imitated John’s pose, sank their tiny fractions of inches to the pounded floor.

“I’m damned!”

Kidder looked at me for a long moment. “You are,” he said.

“I’ve never seen ants like these!”

“No one has,” he said. “There never have been any.”

“They—they
think
like primitive men!”

“They think. Men are also creatures that think. At the risk of seeming to belabor a point, Mr. Egan, let me put it this way; men and these ants are creatures which think. Grant a living thing intelligence and it will conduct itself as a thinking being. Ant or human or anything else, there can be no basic difference. Varying details—yes. You don’t plan the same period furniture for a sestoped that you do for a biped. You have no heating to plan for ant architecture, for ants are without body heat. For humans there is a whole art and science dedicated to clothing. For ants, there is an art and industry to oviparous eugenics. But by and large, the results are the same when the bases are the same.”

“But—” I licked my lips, swallowed. “That may be true. But—ants! They can’t think. They’re creatures of instinct!”

“Quite right, Egan. Quite right. But not these ants.”

“Why not?”

“Because they have intelligence. Come—I’ll show you more.” He took my elbow and led me to the next window.

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