Selected Stories (39 page)

“An autopsy would have shown it, wouldn’t it?” he demanded.

The girl nodded. “Very readily. That was a close call.”

Budgie looked from one to the other. “Will somebody tell me what in blazes this is all about?”

Muhlenberg met the girl’s gaze. She nodded. He put an arm around Budgie. “Listen, girl reporter. Our—our friend here’s something … something new and different.”

“Not new,” said the girl. “We’ve been around for thousands of years.”

“Have you now!” He paused to digest that, while Budgie squirmed and protested, “But—but—but—”

“Shush, you,” said Muhlenberg, and squeezed her shoulders gently. “What you spent the afternoon with isn’t a man, Budgie, any more than what I spent most of the night with was a woman. Right?”

“Right,” the girl said.

“And the Siamese twins weren’t Siamese twins, but two of our friend’s kind who—who—”

“They were in syzygy.” An inexpressible sadness was in the smooth, almost contralto, all but tenor voice.

“In what?” asked Budgie.

Muhlenberg spelled it for her. “In some forms of life,” he started to explain, “well, the microscopic animal called paramecium’s a good example—reproduction is accomplished by fission. The creature elongates, and so does its nucleus. Then the nucleus breaks in two, and one half goes to each end of the animal. Then the rest of the animal breaks, and presto—two paramecia.”

“But you—he—”

“Shaddup,” he said. “I’m lecturing. The only trouble with reproduction by fission is that it affords no variation of strains. A single line of Paramecium would continue to reproduce that way until, by the law of averages, its dominant traits would all be nonsurvival ones, and bang—no more paramecia. So they have another process to take care of that difficulty. One Paramecium rests beside another, and gradually their contacting side walls begin to fuse. The nuclei gravitate toward that point. The side walls then break down, so that the nuclei then have access to one another. The nuclei flow together, mix and mingle, and after a time they separate and half goes into each animal. Then the side walls close the opening, break away from one another, and each animal goes its way.

“That is syzygy. It is in no sense a sexual process, because paramecia have no sex. It has no direct bearing on reproduction either—that can happen with or without syzygy.” He turned to their companion. “But I’d never heard of syzygy in the higher forms.”

The faintest of smiles. “It’s unique with us, on this planet anyway.”

“What’s the rest of it?” he demanded.

“Our reproduction? We’re parthenogenetic females.”

“Y-you’re a female?” breathed Budgie.

“A term of convenience,” said Muhlenberg. “Each individual has both kinds of sex organs. They’re self-fertilizing.”

“That’s a—a what do you call it?—a hermaphrodite,” said Budgie. “Excuse me,” she added in a small voice.

Muhlenberg and the girl laughed uproariously; and the magic of that creature was that the laughter couldn’t hurt. “It’s a very different thing,” said Muhlenberg. “Hermaphrodites are human. She—our friend there—isn’t.”

“You’re the humanest thing I ever met in my whole life,” said Budgie ardently.

The girl reached across the table and touched Budgie’s arm. Muhlenberg suspected that that was the very first physical contact either he or Budgie had yet received from the creature, and that it was a rare thing and a great compliment.

“Thank you,” the girl said softly. “Thank you very much for saying that.” She nodded to Muhlenberg. “Go on.”

“Technically—though I know of no case where it has actually been possible—hermaphrodites can have contact with either sex. But parthenogenetic females won’t, can’t, and wouldn’t. They don’t need to. Humans cross strains along with the reproductive process. Parthenogenesis separates the two acts completely.” He turned to the girl. “Tell me, how often do you reproduce?”

“As often as we wish to.”

“And syzygy?”

“As often as we must. Then—we must.”

“And that is—”

“It’s difficult. It’s like the paramecia’s, essentially, but it’s infinitely more complex. There’s cell meeting and interflow, but in tens and then dozens, hundreds, then thousands of millions of cells. The join begins here—” she put her hand at the approximate location of the human heart—“and extends. But you saw it in those whom I burned. You are one of the few human beings who ever have.”

“That isn’t what I saw,” he reminded her gently.

She nodded, and again there was that deep sadness. “That murder was such a stupid, incredible, unexpected thing!”

“Why were they in the park?” he asked, his voice thick with pity. “Why, out there, in the open, where some such human slugs could find them?”

“They took a chance, because it was important to them,” she said wearily. She looked up, and her eyes were luminous. “We love the outdoors. We love the earth, the feel and smell of it, what lives from it and in it. Especially then. It was such a deep thicket, such an isolated pocket. It was the merest accident that those—those men found them there. They couldn’t move. They were—well, medically you could call it unconscious. Actually, there—there never was a consciousness like the one which comes with syzygy.”

“Can you describe it?”

She shook her head slowly, and it was no violation of her complete frankness. “Do you know, you couldn’t describe sexuality to me so that I could understand it? I have no—no comparison, no analogies. It—” she looked from one to the other—“it amazes me. In some ways I envy it. I know it is a strife, which we avoid, for we are very gentle. But you have a capacity for enjoying strife, and all the pain, all the misery and poverty and cruelty which you suffer, is the cornerstone of everything you build. And you build more than anyone or anything in the known universe.”

Budgie was wide-eyed. “You envy
us. You?
”

She smiled. “Don’t you think the things you admire me for are rather commonplace among my own kind? It’s just that they’re rare in humans.”

Muhlenberg said slowly, “Just what is your relationship to humanity?”

“It’s symbiotic, of course.”

“Symbiotic? You live with us, and us with you, like the cellulose-digesting microbes in a termite? Like the yucca moth, which can eat only nectar from the yucca cactus, which can spread its pollen only through the yucca moth?”

She nodded. “It’s purely symbiotic. But it isn’t easy to explain. We live on that part of humans which makes them different from animals.”

“And in turn—”

“We cultivate it in humans.”

“I don’t understand that,” said Budgie flatly.

“Look into your legends. We’re mentioned often enough there. Who were the sexless angels? Who is the streamlined fat boy on your Valentine’s Day cards? Where does inspiration come from? Who knows three notes of a composer’s new symphony, and whistles the next phrase as he walks by the composer’s house? And—most important to you two—who really understands that part of love between humans which is not sexual—because we can understand no other kind? Read your history, and you’ll see where we’ve been. And in exchange we get the building—bridges, yes, and aircraft and soon, now, space-ships. But other kinds of building too. Songs and poetry and this new thing, this increasing sense of the oneness of all your species. And now it is fumbling toward a United Nations, and later it will grope for the stars; and where it builds, we thrive.”

“Can you name this thing you get from us—this thing that is the difference between men and the rest of the animals?”

“No. But call it a sense of achievement. Where you feel that most, you feed us most. And you feel it most when others of your kind enjoy what you build.”

“Why do you keep yourselves hidden?” Budgie suddenly asked. “Why?” She wrung her hands on the edge of the table. “You’re so beautiful!”

“We have to hide,” the other said gently. “You still kill anything that’s … different.”

Muhlenberg looked at that open, lovely face and felt a sickness, and he could have cried. He said, “Don’t you ever kill anything?” and then hung his head, because it sounded like a defense for the murdering part of humanity. Because it was.

“Yes,” she said very softly, “we do.”

“You can
hate
something?”

“It isn’t hate. Anyone who hates, hates himself as well as the object of his hate. There’s another emotion called righteous anger. That makes us kill.”

“I can’t conceive of such a thing.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost eight-forty.”

She raised herself from her booth and looked out to the corner. It was dark now, and the usual crowd of youths had gathered under the street-lights.

“I made appointments with three more people this evening,” she said. “They are murderers. Just watch.” Her eyes seemed to blaze.

Under the light, two of the youths were arguing. The crowd, but for a prodding yelp or two, had fallen silent and was beginning to form a ring. Inside the ring, but apart from the two who were arguing, was a third—smaller, heavier and, compared with the sharp-creased, bright-tied arguers, much more poorly dressed, in an Eisenhower jacket with one sleeve tattered up to the elbow.

What happened then happened with frightening speed. One of the arguers smashed the other across the mouth. Spitting blood, the other staggered back, made a lightning move into his coat pocket. The blade looked for all the world like a golden fan as it moved in the cyclic pulsations of the street-lamp. There was a bubbling scream, a deep animal grunt, and two bodies lay tangled and twitching on the sidewalk while blood gouted and seeped and defied the sharpness of creases and the colors of ties.

Far up the block a man shouted and a whistle shrilled. Then the street corner seemed to become a great repulsing pole for humans. People ran outward, rayed outward, until, from above, they must have looked like a great splash in mud, reaching out and out until the growing ring broke and the particles scattered and were gone. And then there were only the bleeding bodies and the third one, the one with the tattered jacket, who hovered and stepped and waited and did not know which way to go. There was the sound of a single pair of running feet, after the others had all run off to silence, and these feet belonged to a man who ran fast and ran closer and breathed heavily through a shrieking police whistle.

The youth in the jacket finally turned and ran away, and the policeman shouted once around his whistle, and then there were two sharp reports and the youth, running hard, threw up his hands and fell without trying to turn his face away, and skidded on it and lay still with one foot turned in and the other turned out.

The girl in the dark sweater and blue jeans turned away from the windows and sank back into her seat, looking levelly into the drawn faces across the table. “Those were the men who killed those two in the park,” she said in a low voice, “and that is how we kill.”

“A little like us,” said Muhlenberg weakly. He found his handkerchief and wiped off his upper lip. “Three of them for two of you.”

“Oh, you don’t understand,” she said, and there was pity in her voice. “It wasn’t because they killed those two. It was because they pulled them apart.”

Gradually, the meaning of this crept into Muhlenberg’s awed mind, and the awe grew with it. For here was a race which separated insemination from the mixing of strains, and apart from them, in clean-lined definition, was a third component, a psychic interflow. Just a touch of it had given him a magic night and Budgie an enchanted day; hours without strife, without mixed motives or misinterpretations.

If a human, with all his grossly efficient combination of functions, could be led to appreciate one light touch to that degree, what must it mean to have that third component, pure and in essence, torn apart in its fullest flow? This was worse than any crime could be to a human; and yet, where humans can claim clear consciences while jailing a man for a year for stealing a pair of shoes, these people repay the cruelest sacrilege of all with a quick clean blow. It was removal, not punishment. Punishment was alien and inconceivable to them.

He slowly raised his face to the calm, candid eyes of the girl. “Why have you shown us all this?”

“You needed me,” she said simply.

“But you came up to destroy those bodies so no one would know—”

“And I found you two, each needing what the other had, and blind to it. No, not blind. I remember you said that if you ever could really share something, you could be very close.” She laughed. “Remember your niche, the one that’s finished early and never exactly filled? I told you at the time that it wouldn’t be enough by itself if it
were
filled, and anyone completely without it wouldn’t have enough either. And you—” She smiled at Budgie. “You never made any secret about what you wanted. And there the two of you were, each taking what you already had, and ignoring what you needed.”

“Headline!” said Budgie, “Common Share Takes Stock.”

“Subhead!” grinned Muhlenberg, “Man With A Niche Meets Girl With An Itch.”

The girl slid out of the booth. “You’ll do,” she said.

“Wait! You’re not going to leave us! Aren’t we ever going to see you again?”

“Not knowingly. You won’t remember me, or any of this.”

“How can you take away—”

“Shush, Muley. You know she can.”

“Yes, I guess she—wait though—wait! You give us all this knowledge just so we’ll understand—and then you take it all away again. What good will that do us?”

She turned toward them. It may have been because they were still seated and she was standing, but she seemed to tower over them. In a split second of fugue, he had the feeling that he was looking at a great light on a mountain.

“Why, you poor things—didn’t you know? Knowledge and understanding aren’t props for one another. Knowledge is a pile of bricks, and understanding is a way of building. Build for me!”

They were in a joint called Shank’s. After the triple killing, and the wild scramble to get the story phoned in, they started home.

“Muley,” she asked suddenly, “what’s syzygy?”

“What on earth made you ask me that?”

“It just popped into my head. What is it?”