The Perfect Host (3 page)

The obvious analogy would be jazz.

VII. CODA:

Literary Critic Announces Refutation to Sturgeon’s Law

Borrego Springs, California. At a press conference today, postmodernist expert and cyberpunk promoter, Dr. Larry McCaffery announced results of recent tests he has been conducting to determine the accuracy of “Sturgeon’s Law.” First proposed by the late science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon in the mid-1950s, Sturgeon’s Law essentially states, “Of course 90 percent of science fiction is crap, 90 percent of
everything
is crap.” According to McCaffery, however, his own literary research indicates that while Sturgeon’s Law is valid in the great majority of cases, there are important exceptions—specifically, Sturgeon’s own stories. “After careful analysis of some 17 stories written by Sturgeon himself and collected into
The Perfect Host: Volume Five of the Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
, I’m forced to conclude that Sturgeon’s Law simply doesn’t apply to Sturgeon’s own stories.” When pressed, McCaffery added that readers and critics could continue to apply Sturgeon’s Law in the great majority of cases: “Careful measurements taken on a control group of non-Sturgeon stories consistently produced “crap-percentages” that were consistently in the 93 to 97 percent range; however, this percentage dropped drastically when applied to Sturgeon’s own stories.

Asked if he could explain the remarkable disparity in crap-percentages, McCaffery cited a number of possible factors that might have contributed to his findings: “Empathy is undoubtedly one of the main factors. If you look at the main characters in the 17 stories I conducted my readings on, you’ll find that, first of all, they’re a marvelously motley crowd: you’ve got your usual sf types—scientists, military figures, and so on—but you’ve also got cowpokes, outcasts, musicians, murderers, misfits, kids, old people, idiots, geniuses, heroes, villains, and several different kinds of aliens. And yet somehow Sturgeon seemed to be able to empathize with them all, even with truly repellent figures like Fluke, the hipster jazz musician and murderer in ‘Die, Maestro, Die!’ ”

Asked if the empathy factor might not be related to the well-known theme of ‘Love’ which Sturgeon himself had posited as being one of the commonalities present in all his stories, McCaffery agreed, but hastened to add, “There’s no question that ‘love’ is one of the building blocks in all Sturgeon stories, but there’s so many different kinds of love—so many “isotopes,” as it were—that just noting its presence in his work doesn’t really tell you much. It’s like saying that carbon is one of the common features of human beings—that’s true, but unless you know something about what that carbon is
combined with
, you aren’t going to really know much about any given person. For instance, in the case of these particular 17 stories, my research was able to identify several different kinds of love—parental love (“Quietly,” “Prodigy”), romantic love (for example, “The Martian and the Moron,” “One Foot and the Grave” and “The Dark Goddess”), and of course sexual love (in “Scars,” “The Music,” “Till Death Do Us Join” and “Die, Maestro, Die!”). You could also say that Sturgeon ‘loves’ all his characters in the sense that he cares enough about them to produce some understanding of them—whereas in most crappy genre writing, the authors don’t really (if you’ll pardon the expression)
give a shit
about their characters, especially the bad guys. This doesn’t mean he forgives them or sympathizes with them—just that he empathizes with them.”

McCaffery also noted that Sturgeon’s well-known stylistic virtuosity undoubtedly contriburted to the low level of crap detected in the stories he analyzed. “One of the things that my readings of these stories confirmed is that Sturgeon’s stories nearly always exhibited a far greater attention to language—assonance, alliteration and other features of sound, patterns of symbol and metaphor, and so forth—than do the works in the control group.”

By way of conclusion, McCaffery noted, “There’s a lot of other tests that need to be done, and there will no doubt be other experiments that will contradict these findings. That’s okay. Ted Sturgeon himself would have welcomed these sorts of contradictions and controversy. He always liked to keep things stirred up.”

      Larry McCaffery

      April 1998

Foreword Notes

S
HE WAS BORN
in a house near a very old town, quietly. Her father was turning the pages of very old books, and thinking strange thoughts in the gloom of his study. Her mother lay silent and suffering, two flights above him. Her father was lost in his studies, but waiting for some sign, some faint sound of the borning. Her mother lay still by the light of a candle. The peak of her suffering came to her swiftly. Her eyes puckered deep, and they looked like the mouths of the burrows of animals scarring the face of a white limestone cliff. She stiffened, and, crushing the pillow beneath the taut arch of her nape, she bit her thin lips and she buried her nails in her palms. The breath whistled out of her delicate, quivering nostrils; and then she decided to draw no more, and in silence she trembled and died.

“You’re a fool,” said the doctor.

“Do your work,” snapped the child’s father.

The doctor went on with his work amongst the clutter and clabber of childbirth. The windows at dawn were at last showing lighter than their frames, but the light did not challenge the doctor’s lamp. Rolled up and tumbled away, the bedclothes strayed off on the floor, full of hollows and shadows. Rolled away, useless and spent and inert, the body of the mother lay out of the lamplight, graying with the growing dawn.

The doctor, his supple hands saving the child, said, “My work is to heal and to cure, and to right what I can of the bungling of fools. But it is also to fight fools’ work by speaking my mind. Why didn’t you call me days ago? Why didn’t you send her to the hospital?”

“She wouldn’t have gone,” said the father starkly.

The doctor glanced up at him. The father was flat, wide, tall, with a nose like an eave and sea-going eyes. “
You
couldn’t have taken her? You could carry off six like her under your arm.”

“She wouldn’t have gone,” repeated the father. “She’d have died.”

“She did,” said the doctor bluntly.

“Then she was bound to. I had her for a day or so more. In that time, with all she fought, she did not have to fight me as well.”

The doctor wrapped up the child and put it in the waiting basket. “You loved her, didn’t you?”

“That is not a doctor’s question. Have you written out the things to be done and what the child will eat?”

“Yes.”

“And the certificate for her?” He motioned toward the corpse. “And whatever papers are necessary for the child?”

“All those.”

“You are paid.”

“Too well, in money.”

“Good. Now go. Do not come back here for anything, ever.”

The doctor moved to a basin and washed his hands. “You’ll send for me if I’m needed? Children sicken, you know.”

“This one won’t. I am not accustomed to failure and there will be none of it in my house. The child will not sicken.”

The doctor packed his instruments, glanced around the room, and walked out. The father followed him to the door with that in his bearing which ensured the departure and was not polite. At the door the doctor turned suddenly, to stare up into the long controlled face, to look blatantly at the signs in it of the naked grief that was about to break there. “Have you no friends, man?”

“Friends!” spat the father. “There are friends about me as there is disease about you. No sickness will get the better of you if it is within your power. No friend will eat, and suck, and weaken me. Go back to your ingrown nails and your physics and your death-watches, and leave me to myself.”

The doctor shrugged and left, blowing what seemed to be a taint out of his nostrils.

She was born quietly, and quietly she passed her childhood. Her father, when he thought about her silence in other terms than
appreciation, thought her a mute. When she showed she was not, he felt no surprise.

The house was large and as alone as its master. The rooms and the stairs and the wide hallways were carpeted, wall to wall, with heavy gray rugs. The house was old and solid, its timbers pegged, its paneling and joinery screwed and glued and immovable. Inside the brassbound oaken slab of a door, a cushioned vestibule held a rack for shoes. Barefoot he glided about the house, and barefoot his daughter toddled until, early indeed, she learned his soundless stride.

He named her—Quietly. Quietly she grew.

She was not beautiful—not if mannequins and calendar girls are beautiful. Her face was her father’s, but softened with womanliness and with something else. Her nose was his, but rounded. She had his far-horizoned gray eyes, but wide and wide-set. Her jaw was strong and planar, yet only a part of the clean complex curve of shoulder, neck and cheek. Her hair fell to her waist and was the color of black-iron heated until it just begins to glow its deepest red.

He taught her strangely. He brought her, in his teaching, not only the contents of his library, but the quintessence of his own astonishing experience. All that he said was simple—simple and quiet. He explained that often, saying,

“What is basic is simple. Complicated things are not basic, and are not important.”

So everything she learned was simple. She learned about earning—that things could be had without being earned, but that without being earned, they could not be kept. She learned about fear—that it’s not a shameful thing, nor a foolish one, since it is the essence of self-preservation; but that he who truly hides his fear is accepted as superior. She learned about giving—that to give is to get, but that to give too much is to take and to lose. She learned to define evil: that which is extreme. She learned to define good: that which is moderate. She learned, above all, to be alone. She learned to accept aloneness at any time—halfway through a meal, or on waking, or even in the midst of a lesson, for her father would sometimes leave a sentence unfinished and step out of the room, to be gone, sometimes,
for days. There were occasions when there was no food in the house, or when there was food hidden. In these cases, she did without, or she went into the woods and made snares and caught small animals or collected berries and wild birds’ eggs. The one inexcusable offense was to sit frightened and bleat her father’s name. That happened once, and all her life she bore the scar of it, for he shouted at her. Her conditioning made her immune to the one thing that had taken her father by surprise—the dreadful fact that aloneness can come to any human being, without warning or justice.

“If you ever leave me,” he said once, “you must find your own way.”

“Why would I ever leave you?”

“Because you must. You will. For a year.”

“You sometimes speak as if you knew the future, Father.”

“I do,” he responded immediately. “I do because I make my own.”

“I’ll never leave you,” she said positively, and he smiled.

She hunted, but only to eat. She loved flowers, but never cut one. She ran and climbed, and in the warm days would leave the house naked and leap through the meadows to the woods which began at the top of the hill. She followed secret glades and deer-runs known only to her, to a secret pool, cold in the shade, but with its margins all but steaming at the end of three midday hours, when the sun vaulted over it on a thick pillar of light.

One August evening, after swimming and drying her clean brown body in the sun, she returned to the house by the orchard path, stopping for a while by her rabbit-hutches. When the lengthening shadows reminded her of the hour, and her healthy young appetite gave a sudden and hearty seconding, she skipped to the kitchen door.

It was locked.

She paused, a small frown flickering between her wide-set eyes, then shrugged. Small and unexpected changes in her environment were part of her father’s way. “Nothing is ‘always,’ Quietly,” he had often said. “Look, child. The spoon is in the drawer. It is there today. It was there yesterday and last year. So by all means say ‘The spoon is in the drawer.’ But when you say ‘the spoon is
always
in the drawer,’
you are saying, partly, ‘The spoon will be in the drawer tomorrow.’ You can’t know that!”

The kitchen door had always been unlocked until now … She shrugged, and went round to the side door.

The side door and the front door and the wide doors over the cellar steps, and the bedroom windows which opened on the roof of the shed—they were all locked.