The Perfect Host (54 page)

The hurkle kitten found this vastly entertaining. It began to radiate what was, on Lirht, a purr, or glow. In this fantastic place it was not visible; instead, the trapped animals began to respond with most curious writhings and squirmings and sussurant rubbings of their hides with their claws. This pleased the kitten even more, for it loved to be noticed and it redoubled the glow. The receptive motions of the animals became almost frantic.

Then the tall one turned around again. It made a curious sound or two. Then it picked up a stick from the platform before it and brought it down with a horrible crash.

The sudden noise frightened the hurkle kitten half out of its wits. It went invisible; but its visibility system was reversed here, and it was suddenly outstandingly evident. It turned and leaped outside, and before it reached the ground, a loud metallic shrilling pursued it. There were gabblings and shufflings from the room which added force to the kitten’s consuming terror. It scrambled to a low growth of shrubbery and concealed itself among the leaves.

Very soon, however, its irrepressible good nature returned. It lay relaxed, watching the slight movement of the stems and leaves—some of them may have been flowers—in a slight breeze. A winged creature came humming and dancing about one of the blossoms. The kitten rested on one of its middle legs, shot the other out, and caught the creature in flight. The thing promptly jabbed the kitten’s foot with a sharp black probe. This the kitten ignored. It ate the thing, and belched. It lay still for a few minutes, savoring the sensation of the bee in its clarfel. The experiment was suddenly not a success. It ate the bee twice more and then gave it up as a bad job.

It turned its attention again to the window, wondering what those racks of animals might be up to now. It seemed very quiet up there.… Boldly the kitten came from hiding and launched itself at the window again. It was pleased with itself; it was getting quite proficient at precision leaps in this mad place. Preening itself, it balanced on the window sill and looked inside.

Surprisingly, all the smaller animals were gone. The larger one was huddled behind the shelf at the end of the room. The kitten and the animal watched each other for a long moment. The animal leaned down and stuck something into the wall.

Immediately there was a mechanical humming sound and something on the platform near the window began to revolve. The next thing the kitten knew it was enveloped in a cloud of pungent dust.

It choked and became as visible as it was frightened, which was very. For a long moment it was incapable of motion; gradually, however, it became conscious of a poignant, painfully penetrating sensation which thrilled it to the core. It gave itself up to the feeling. Wave after wave of agonized ecstasy rolled over it, and it began to dance to the waves. It glowed brilliantly, though the emanation served only to make the animal in the room scratch hysterically.

The hurkle felt strange, transported. It turned and leaped high into the air, out from the building.

Mr. Stott stopped scratching. Disheveled indeed, he went to the window and watched the odd sight of the blue beast, quite invisible now, but coated with dust, so that it was like a bubble in a fog. It bounced
across the lawn in huge floating leaps, leaving behind it diminishing patches of white powder in the grass. He smacked his hands one on the other and, smirking, withdrew to straighten up. He had saved the Earth from battle, murder, and bloodshed forever, but he did not know that. No one ever found out what he had done. So he lived a long and happy life.

And the hurkle kitten?

It bounded off through the long shadows, and vanished in a copse of bushes. There it dug itself a shallow pit, working drowsily, more and more slowly. And at last it sank down and lay motionless, thinking strange thoughts, making strange music, and racked by strange sensations. Soon even its slightest movements ceased, and it stretched out stiffly, motionless.…

For about two weeks. At the end of that time, the hurkle, no longer a kitten, was possessed of a fine, healthy litter of just under two hundred young. Perhaps it was the DDT, and perhaps it was the new variety of radiation that the hurkle received from the terrestrial sky, but they were all parthenogenetic females, even as you and I.

And the humans? Oh, we
bred
so! And how happy we were!

But the humans had the slidy itch, and the scratchy itch, and the prickly or tingly or titillative paresthetic formication. And there wasn’t a thing they could do about it.

So they left.

Isn’t this a lovely place?

“Quietly”:
unpublished until now. Probably written in late 1947. Recently discovered amidst the author’s papers in storage at the home of his estate’s trustee. This was intended as the beginning of a novel; as far as we know it was Theodore Sturgeon’s first start on a piece of writing that he conceived of as a book-length novel. It is included in this collection on the editor’s judgment that it can in fact be read as a short story (and despite the puzzling or intriguing circumstance that there is no evidence of Sturgeon ever having offered this unfinished novel-start to any magazine or other possible market as a story). One year later (late 1948) he did begin writing what became his first completed and published novel,
The Dreaming Jewels
.

It is quite surprising, and perhaps a sufficient explanation as to why Sturgeon did not find the inspiration or motivation/energy to complete
Quietly
, that this first conscious effort at writing a book-length work of fiction was not in the fantasy or science fiction genres, but was quite unambiguously a “mainstream” (i.e., non-genre) story or novel.

The manuscript I found is untitled, and consists of 23 double-spaced typewritten pages, with the author’s family name in the upper left corner (indicating he was writing and typing with the idea that this draft might someday be submitted for publication). The last page ends at the normal page-bottom and the last paragraph ends in the middle of a line of type, indicating that the paragraph is complete. There are no apparently related manuscript pages among Sturgeon’s papers, and it seems very likely that the bottom of
this page
is
where Sturgeon paused in this attempt sometime before writing the following comments to his mother in a letter dated January 2, 1948:

[after a page and a half describing stories he has sold or failed to sell to various markets and telling of recent sales to anthologies and of his effort to sell his magazine short novel “Killdozer!” to a mainstream publisher (Simon and Schuster) and of his forthcoming first book (from a small specialty press, his first collection of stories,
Without Sorcery)…
]
And then there’s my novel, if I can only get it done. It’s called QUIETLY, and it’s about a girl who is also called Quietly. Her father was a hermit who brought her up to be truly self-sufficient. Just as THE FOUNTAINHEAD (Ayn Rand) deals with the discovery of Ego as the important individual factor, rather than the ever-popular Alter (heroes are always kind and good) so QUIETLY will bring out the importance of We—not altruistic We; altruism is essentially a third-person motivation; but a first-person-plural, utterly subjective We. Quietly, at the age of eighteen, finds herself locked out of her father’s house, naked, and eighteen years of age, and [with] the certain knowledge that she must leave, live among people, and stay away for a year. Her thinking is simple and functional; her success is as complete as her unhappiness; her enlightenment comes with her full evaluation of that We. With it comes the terrible realization that her deified father is a twisted, sick old escapist
.

I really don’t know if I’ll finish it this year; I intend to let it write itself
.

It’s clear from Sturgeon’s comments elsewhere that he regarded some of his finest and most-acclaimed stories—i.e. “Bianca’s Hands, “It,” “Killdozer!”—as having “written themselves” in the sense that the story flowed from him very easily as soon as he wrote the first sentence or passed another turning point in the narrative or in the writing experience. Evidently he had hopes that one day he would sit down to write
this page
of
Quietly
and the flood-gates would open. But this was not to happen. Instead, at the end of the year, he found himself writing a different and more specifically fantastic novel about the journey-into-the-world of a young person who’d been raised by a difficult father. Different sort of difficult, and a different sort of novel. I will describe the somewhat strained
circumstances of the birth of that novel,
The Dreaming Jewels
, at the conclusion of these story notes.

But what is most striking about “Quietly” is not its remote thematic connection to
The Dreaming Jewels
but the unmistakable parallels between it and the opening scenes of Theodore Sturgeon’s most acclaimed and most beloved and influential piece of writing, his 1953 novel
More than Human
.

In light of Sturgeon’s comments to his mother (above) about “the importance of We,” it is not unreasonable to suggest that
More than Human
may indeed be the novel Sturgeon had the scent of when he started
Quietly
sometime in late 1947. It just took a long gestation (five years) before it was ready to write itself.

The text of “Quietly” does not in any way foreshadow the
homo gestalt
theme of
More than Human
. Only Sturgeon’s announcement to his mother that his intention is to explore what “We” means (subjectively) to humans, hints at the extraordinarily powerful theme and vision that the 1953 novel
More than Human
would explore and express.

The text of “Quietly” does bear considerable resemblance to vital (and very powerful in establishing the reader’s relationship to the characters of the novel and to its narrative conceit and voice) elements of the opening scenes of “The Fabulous Idiot,” the first section of
More than Human
. “Baby Is Three,” the middle section of the novel, was written well before “The Fabulous Idiot,” which was written when Ballantine Books asked Sturgeon to make a novel out of the very well-received magazine novella “Baby Is Three.” Looking (in himself perhaps) for the part of the story that could believably and effectively lead up to and lay the emotional groundwork for the situation in “Baby Is Three,” Sturgeon evidently (and either consciously or unconsciously) found himself back in the world of “Quietly”—the young woman (in the case of
More than Human
, women) raised by the insane, obsessive hermit father, and her very unusual interaction with and perspective on humanity and civilization as a result.

The nature of the two fathers’ obsessions is quite different in the two stories; yet the similarity in the situations is remarkable, particularly that in each case the father focuses on extreme “home
schooling” techniques—on education as well as isolation—to try to create in his daughter or daughters his own ideal or wished-for perfect state. (He wants to reclaim the Garden of Eden by reprogramming or reeducating Eve, one might say.) A few noteworthy parallels between the texts of “Quietly” and of the first section of
More than Human:

1) Quietly’s mother and Alicia and Evelyn’s mother both die in childbirth.
Alicia was four when little Evelyn had been born and their mother had died cursing
[their father],
her indignation at last awake and greater than her agony and her fear
. When Quietly was born,
Her father was lost in his studies.… Her mother lay still by the light of a candle. The peak of her suffering came to her swiftly.… The breath whistled out of her delicate, quivering nostrils; and then she decided to draw no more, and in silence she trembled and died
.

2) Quietly is eighteen when her father locks her out of their house in the woods and the action of the novel begins. Alicia is celebrating her nineteenth birthday when the idiot, Lone, crawls under the picket fence surrounding their house in the woods and her father kills her sister and the action of the novel begins.

3) Each father is described as living in a large, isolated house and spending a lot of time in his study with his very old books.

4) Each daughter is successfully isolated from contact with the entire human world outside her house throughout her childhood.

5) In both texts the father’s education of his daughter specifically includes him teaching her his definition of “evil.”

6) Sturgeon describes to his mother an intended climax of the novel as [Quietly’s]
terrible realization that her deified father is a twisted, sick old escapist
. This scene is actually included in
More than Human
(ironically on
this page
–
this page
of most paperback editions), when Alicia Kew realizes her father was mad, and curses him as her mother did before her.

A number of themes that are important in Sturgeon’s later work surface in this fragment called “Quietly.” The idea that “civilized” people may be driven by their fear of being alone plays an important part in Sturgeon’s 1953 response to/portrait of McCarthyism, “Mr. Costello, Hero.”

In his 1/2/48 letter quoted above, Sturgeon indicates that one model or stimulus for this non-sf polemical novel of ideas that he wants to write is Ayn Rand’s
The Fountainhead
. In another letter to his mother (who was living in Scotland at the time) on July 4, 1947, he tells her he is planning to marry the singer he’s living with, Mary Mair, and writes,
Jay Stanton, on hearing that our first child will be called Ayn (after the remarkable author of the remarkable FOUNTAINHEAD) Mair Sturgeon, said “Ayn Mair is e’en enow …”

When Sturgeon in the 1/2/48 letter speaks of
The Fountainhead
and says his novel
Quietly
will bring out the importance of an “utterly subjective ‘We’ ” this can be understood as a distinction to Rand’s widely-discussed (her novel was published in 1943) philosophy of “objectivism.”

The word “function” turns up several times in “Quietly”:
Fear is a functional thing, and she was happy to yield to it when it had a function
. In still another letter to “Mum,” dated 9/25/47, Sturgeon says in relation to his wish to get married:
I also want to make more children, and this time do it right … they will be tall children and graceful, with good brains and good profiles and good bodies, and by God they’ll have a sense of values. Keynote: Functionalism. Function is a thing which can find its place among large artificial values, as well as the verities … hey, I’d like to tell you a codification which I have learned from Mary Mair. This sounds easy to say, but believe me, it has taken me nearly thirty years of reasonably intensive living to realize fully what it means. It can be stated as an axiom and a couple of corollaries: