Sturgeon, Theodore - More Than Human

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More Than Human
MORE THAN HUMAN
Part 1: The Fabulous Idiot
Part 2: Baby Is Three
Part 3: Morality
Part One:
The Fabulous Idiot
The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the nickering
of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and
there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his
face was dead.
Men turned away from him, women would not look, children stopped and watched him. It did not
seem to matter to the idiot. He expected nothing from any of them. When the white lightning struck, he
was fed. He fed himself when he could, he went without when he could. When he could do neither of
these things he was fed by the first person who came face to face with him. The idiot never knew why,
and never wondered. He did not beg. He would simply stand and wait. When someone met his eyes there
would be a coin in his hand, a piece of bread, a fruit. He would eat and his benefactor would hurry away,
disturbed, not understanding. Sometimes, nervously, they would speak to him; they would speak about
him to each other. The idiot heard the sounds, but they had no meaning for him. He lived inside
somewhere, apart, and the little link between word and significance hung broken. His eyes were excellent,
and could readily distinguish between a smile and a snarl; but neither could have any impact on a creature
so lacking in empathy, who himself had never laughed and never snarled and so could not comprehend
the feelings of his gay or angry fellows.
He had exactly enough fear to keep his bones together and oiled. He was incapable of anticipating
anything. The stick that raised, the stone that flew found him unaware. But at their touch he would
respond. He would escape. He would start to escape at the first blow and he would keep on trying to
escape until the blows ceased. He escaped storms this way, rockfalls, men, dogs, traffic, and hunger.
He had no preferences. It happened that where he was there was more wilderness than town; since he
lived wherever he found himself, he lived more in the forest than anywhere else.
They had locked him up four times. It had not mattered to him any of the times, nor had it changed
him in any way. Once he had been badly beaten by an inmate and once, even worse, by a guard. In the
other two places there had been the hunger. When there was food and he was left to himself, he stayed.
When it was time for escape, he escaped. The means to escape were in his outer husk; the inner thing that
it carried either did not care or could not command. But when the time came, a guard or a warden would
find himself face to face with the idiot and the idiot’s eyes, whose irises seemed on the trembling point of
spinning like wheels. The gates would open and the idiot would go, and as always the benefactor would
run to do something else, anything else, deeply troubled.
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He was purely animal—a degrading thing to be among men. But most of the time he was an animal
away from men. As an animal in the wood he moved like an animal, beautifully. He killed like an animal,
without hate and without joy. He ate like an animal, everything edible he could find, and he ate (when he
could) only enough and nevermore. He slept like an animal, well and lightly, faced in the opposite
direction from that of a man; for a man going to sleep is about to escape into it while animals are prepared
to escape out of it. He had an animal’s maturity, in which the play of kittens and puppies no longer has a
function. He was without humour and without joy. His spectrum lay between terror and contentment.
He was twenty-five years old.
Like a stone in a peach, a yolk in an egg, he carried another thing. It was passive, it was receptive, it
was awake and alive. If it was connected in any way to the animal integument, it ignored the connexions.
It drew its substance from the idiot and was otherwise unaware of him. He was often hungry, but he rarely
starved. When he did starve, the inner thing shrank a little perhaps; but it hardly noticed its own
shrinking. It must die when the idiot died, but it contained no motivation to delay that event by one
second.
It had no function specific to the idiot. A spleen, a kidney, an adrenal—these have definite functions
and an optimum level for those functions. But this was a thing which only received and recorded. It did
this without words, without a code system of any kind; without translation, without distortion, and
without operable outgoing conduits. It took what it took and gave out nothing.
All around it, to its special senses, was a murmur, a sending. It soaked itself in the murmur, absorbed
it as it came, all of it. Perhaps it matched and classified, or perhaps it simply fed, taking what it needed
and discarding the rest in some intangible way. The idiot was unaware. The thing inside...
Without words: Warm when the wet comes for a little but not enough for long enough. (Sadly): Never
dark again. A feeling of pleasure. A sense of subtle crushing and Take away the pink, the scratchy. Wait,
wait, you can go back, yes, you can go back. Different, but almost as good. (Sleep feelings): Yes, that’s it!
That’s the—oh! (Alarm): You’ve gone too far, come back, come back, come—(A twisting, a sudden
cessation; and one less “voice”.)... It all rushes up, faster, faster, carrying me. (Answer): No, no. Nothing
rushes. It’s still; something pulls you down on to it, that is all. (Fury): They don't hear us, stupid, stupid...
They do... They don't, only crying, only noises.
Without words, though. Impression, depression, dialogue. Radiations of fear, tense fields of
awareness, discontent. Murmuring, sending, speaking, sharing, from hundreds, from thousands of voices.
None, though, for the idiot. Nothing that related to him; nothing he could use. He was unaware of his
inner ear because it was useless to him. He was a poor example of a man, but he was a man; and these
were the voices of the children, the very young children, who had not yet learned to stop trying to be
heard. Only crying, only noises.
Mr Kew was a good father, the very best of fathers. He told his daughter Alicia so, on her nineteenth
birthday. He had said as much to Alicia ever since she was four. She was four when little Evelyn had been
born and their mother had died cursing him, her indignation at last awake and greater than her agony and
her fear.
Only a good father, the very finest of fathers, could have delivered his second child with his own
hands. No ordinary father could have nursed and nurtured the two, the baby and the infant, so tenderly
and so well. No child was ever so protected from evil as Alicia; and when she joined forces with her
father, a mighty structure of purity was created for Evelyn. “Purity triple-distilled,” Mr Kew said to Alicia
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on her nineteenth birthday. “I know good through the study of evil, and have taught you only the good.
And that good teaching has become your good living, and your way of life is Evelyn’s star. I know all the
evil there is and you know all the evil which must be avoided; but Evelyn knows no evil at all.”
At nineteen, of course, Alicia was mature enough to understand these abstracts, this “way of life” and
“distillation” and the inclusive “good” and “evil”. When she was sixteen he had explained to her how a
man went mad if he was alone with a woman, and how the poison sweat appeared on his body, and how
he would put it on her, and then it would cause the horror on her skin. He had pictures of skin like that in
his books. When she was thirteen she had a trouble and told her father about it and he told her with tears
in his eyes that this was because she had been thinking about her body, as indeed she had been. She
confessed it and he punished her body until she wished she had never owned one. And she tried, she tried
not to think like that again, but she did in spite of herself; and regularly, regretfully, her father helped her
in her efforts to discipline her intrusive flesh. When she was eight he taught her how to bathe in darkness,
so she would be spared the blindness of those white eyes of which he also had magnificent pictures. And
when she was six he had hung in her bedroom the picture of a woman, called Angel, and the picture of a
man, called Devil. The woman held her palms up and smiled and the man had his arms out to her, his
hands like hooks, and protruding point-outward from his breastbone was a crooked knife blade with a
wetness on it.
They lived alone in a heavy house on a wooded knoll. There was no driveway, but a path which
turned and turned again, so that from the windows no one could see where it went. It went to a wall, and
in the wall was an iron gate which had not been opened in eighteen years and beside the gate was a steel
panel. Once a day Alicia’s father went down the path to the wall and with two keys opened the two locks
in the panel. He would swing it up and take out food and letters, put money and mail in, and lock it again.
There was a narrow road outside which Alicia and Evelyn had never seen. The woods concealed the
wall and the wall concealed the road. The wall ran by the road for two hundred yards, east and west; it
mounted the hill then until it bracketed the house. Here it met iron pickets, fifteen feet high and so close
together a man could hardly press a fist between them. The tops of the pickets curved out and down, and
between them was cement, and in the cement was broken glass. The pickets ran east and west, connecting
the house to the wall; and where they joined, more pickets ran back and back into the woods in a circle.
The wall and the house, then, were a rectangle and that was forbidden territory. And behind the house
were the two square miles of fenced woodland, and that belonged to Evelyn, with Alicia to watch. There
was a brook there; wild flowers and a little pond; friendly oaks and little hidden glades. The sky above
was fresh and near and the pickets could not be seen for the shouldering masses of holly which grew next
to them, all the way around, blocking the view, breaking the breeze. This closed circle was all the world
to Evelyn, all the world she knew, and all in the world she loved lay in it.
On Alicia’s nineteenth birthday Evelyn was alone by her pond. She could not see the house, she
could not see the holly hedge nor the pickets, but the sky was there, up and up, and the water was there,
by and by. Alicia was in the library with her father; on birthdays he always had special things planned for
Alicia in the library. Evelyn had never been in the library. The library was a place where her father lived,
and where Alicia went at special times. Evelyn never thought of going there, any more than she thought
of breathing water like a speckled trout. She had not been taught to read, but only to listen and obey. She
had never learned to seek, but only to accept. Knowledge was given to her when she was ready for it and
only her father and sister knew just when that might be.
She sat on the bank, smoothing her long skirts. She saw her ankle and gasped and covered it as Alicia
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would do if she were here. She set her back against a willow-trunk and watched the water.
It was spring, the part of spring where the bursting is done, the held-in pressures of desiccated sap-
veins and gum-sealed buds are gone, and all the world’s in a rush to be beautiful. The air was heavy and
sweet; it lay upon lips until they parted, pressed them until they smiled, entered boldly to beat in the
throat like a second heart. It was air with a puzzle to it, for it was still and full of the colors of dreams, all
motionless; yet it had a hurry to it. The stillness and the hurry were alive and laced together, and how
could that be? That was the puzzle.
A dazzle of bird notes stitched through the green. Evelyn’s eyes stung and wonder misted the wood.
Something tensed in her lap. She looked down in time to see her hands attack one another, and off came
her long gloves. Her naked hands fled to the sides of her neck, not to hide something but to share
something. She bent her head and the hands laughed at one another under the iron order of her hair. They
found four hooks and scampered down them. Her high collar eased and the enchanted air rushed in with a
soundless shout. Evelyn breathed as if she had been running. She put out her hand hesitantly, futilely,
patted the grass beside her as if somehow the act might release the inexpressible confusion of delight
within her. It would not, and she turned and flung herself face down in a bed of early mint and wept
because the spring was too beautiful to be borne.
He was in the wood, numbly prying the bark from a dead oak, when it happened. His hands were still and
his head came up hunting, harking. He was as aware of the pressures of spring as an animal, and slightly
more than an animal could be. But abruptly the spring was more than heavy, hopeful air and the shifting
of earth with life. A hard hand on his shoulder could have been no more tangible than this call.
He rose carefully, as if something around him might break if he were clumsy. His strange eyes
glowed. He began to move—he who had never called nor been called, nor responded before. He moved
towards the thing he sensed and it was a matter of will, not of external compulsion. Without analysis, he
was aware of the bursting within him of an encysted need. It had been a part of him all his life but there
was no hope in him that he might express it. And bursting so, it flung a thread across his internal gulf,
linking his alive and independent core to the half-dead animal around it. It was a sending straight to what
was human in him, recieved by an instrument which, up to now, had accepted only the incomprehensible
radiations of the new-born, and so had been ignored. But now it spoke, as it were, in his own tongue.
He was careful and swift, careful and silent. He turned his wide shoulders to one side and the other as
he moved, slipping through the alders, passing the pines closely as if it were intolerable to leave the direct
line between himself and his call. The sun was high; the woods were homogeneously the woods, front,
right, left; yet he followed his course without swerving, not from knowledge, not by any compass, but
purely in conscious response.
He arrived suddenly, for the clearing was, in the forest, a sudden thing. For fifty feet outward the
earth around the close-set pickets had been leached and all trees felled years ago, so that none might
overhang the fence. The idiot slipped out of the wood and trotted across the bare ground to the serried
iron. He put out his arms as he ran, slid his hands between the pickets, and when they caught on his
starved bony forearms his legs kept moving, his feet sliding, as if his need empowered him to walk
through the fence and the impenetrable holly beyond it.
The fact that the barrier would not yield came to him slowly. It was as if his feet understood it first
and stopped trying and then his hands, which withdrew. His eyes, however, would not give up at all.
From his dead face they yearned through the iron, through the holly, ready to burst with answering. His
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mouth opened and a scratching sound emerged. He had never tried to speak before and could not now; the
gesture was an end, not a means, like the starting of tears at a crescendo of music.
He began to move along the fence walking sidewise, finding it unbearable to turn away from the call.
It rained for a day and a night and for half the next day, and when the sun came out it rained again,
upward; it rained light from the heavy jewels which lay on the rich new green. Some jewels shrank and
some fell and then the earth in a voice of softness, and leaves in a voice of texture, and flowers speaking
in color, were grateful.
Evelyn crouched on the window seat, elbows on the sill, her hands cupped to the curve of her cheeks,
their pressure making it easy to smile. Softly, she sang. It was strange to hear for she did not know music;
she did not read and had never been told of music. But there were birds, there was the bassoon of wind in
the eaves sometimes; there were the calls and cooings of small creatures in that part of the wood which
was hers and, distantly, from the part which was not. Her singing was made of these things, with strange
and effortless fluctuations in pitch from an instrument unbound by the diatonic scale, freely phrased.
But I never touch the gladness
May not touch the gladness
Beauty, oh beauty of touchness
Spread like a leaf, nothing between me and the sky but
light,
Rain touches me
Wind touches me
Leaves, other leaves, touch and touch me...
She made music without words for a long moment and was silent, making music without sound,
watching the raindrops fall in the glowing noon.
Harshly, “What are you doing?”
Evelyn started and turned. Alicia stood behind her, her face strangely tight. “What are you doing?”
she repeated.
Evelyn made a vague gesture towards the window, tried to speak.
“Well?”
Evelyn made the gesture again. “Out there,” she said. “I—I—” She slipped off the window seat and
stood. She stood as tall as she could. Her face was hot.
“Button up your collar,” said Alicia. “What is it, Evelyn? Tell me!”
“I’m trying to,” said Evelyn, soft and urgent. She buttoned her collar and her hands fell to her waist.
She pressed herself, hard. Alicia stepped near and pushed the hands away. “Don’t do that. What was
that... what you were doing? Were you talking?”
“Talking, yes. Not you, though. Not Father.”
“There isn’t anyone else.”
“There is,” said Evelyn. Suddenly breathless, she said, “Touch me, Alicia.”
“Touch you?”
“Yes, I... want you to. Just...” She held out her arms. Alicia backed away.
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“We don’t touch one another,” she said, as gently as she could through her shock. “What is it,
Evelyn? Aren’t you well?”
“Yes,” said Evelyn. “No. I don’t know.” She turned to the window. “It isn’t raining. It’s dark here.
There’s so much sun, so much—I want the sun on me, like a bath, warm all over.”
“Silly. Then it would be all light in your bath... We don’t talk about bathing, dear.”
Evelyn picked up a cushion from the window seat. She I put her arms around it and with all her
strength hugged it to her breast.
“Evelyn! Stop that!”
Evelyn whirled and looked at her sister in a way she had never used before. He mouth twisted. She
squeezed her eyes tight closed and when she opened them, tears fell. “I want to,” she cried, “I want to!”
“Evelyn!” Alicia whispered. Wide-eyed, she backed away to the door. “I shall have to tell Father.”
Evelyn nodded, and drew her arms even tighter around the cushion.
When he came to the brook, the idiot squatted down beside it and stared. A leaf danced past, stopped and
curtsied, then made its way through the pickets and disappeared in the low gap the holly had made for it.
He had never thought deductively before and perhaps his effort to follow the leaf was not thought-
born. Yet he did, only to find that the pickets were set in a concrete channel here. They combed the water
from one side to the other; nothing larger than a twig or a leaf could slip through. He wallowed in the
water, pressing against the iron, beating at the submerged cement. He swallowed water and choked and
kept trying, blindly, insistently. He put both his hands on one of the pickets and shook it. It tore his palm.
He tried another and another and suddenly one rattled against the lower cross-member.
It was a different result from that of any other attack. It is doubtful whether he realized that this
difference meant that the iron here had rusted and was therefore weaker; it simply gave hope because it
was different.
He sat down on the bottom of the brook and in water up to his armpits, he placed a foot on each side
of the picket which had rattled. He got his hands on it again, took a deep breath and pulled with all his
strength. A stain of red rose in the water and whirled downstream. He leaned forward, then back with a
tremendous jerk. The rusted underwater segment snapped. He hurtled backward, striking his head
stingingly on the edge of the channel. He went limp for a moment and his body half rolled, half floated
back to the pickets. He inhaled water, coughed painfully, and raised his head. When the spinning world
righted itself he fumbled under the water. He found an opening a foot high but only about seven inches
wide. He put his arm in it, right up to the shoulder, his head submerged. He sat up again and put a leg into
it.
Again he was dimly aware of the inexorable fact that will alone was not enough; that pressure alone
upon the barrier would not make it yield. He moved to the next picket and tried to break it as he had the
one before. It would not move, nor would the one on the other side.
At last he rested. He looked up hopelessly at the fifteen-foot top of the fence with its close-set,
outcurving fangs and its hungry rows of broken glass. Something hurt him; he moved and fumbled and
found himself with the eleven-inch piece of iron he had broken away. He sat with it in his hands, staring
stupidly at the fence.
Touch me, touch me. It was that, and a great swelling of emotion behind it; it was a hunger, a
demand, a flood of sweetness and of need. The call had never ceased, but this was something different. It
was as if the call were a carrier and this a signal suddenly impressed upon it.
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When it happened that thread within him, bridging his two selves, trembled and swelled. Falteringly,
it began to conduct. Fragments and flickerings of inner power shot across, were laden with awareness and
information, shot back. The strange eyes fell to the piece of iron, the hands turned it. His reason itself
ached with disuse as it stirred; then for the first time came into play on such a problem.
He sat in the water, close by the fence, and with the piece of iron he began to rub against the picket
just under the cross-member.
It began to rain. It rained all day and all night and half the next day.
“She was here,” said Alicia. Her face was flushed.
Mr Kew circled the room, his deep-set eyes alight. He ran his whip through his fingers. There were
four lashes. Alicia said, remembering, “And she wanted me to touch her. She asked me to.”
“She’ll be touched,” he said. “Evil, evil,” he muttered. “Evil can’t be filtered out,” he chanted, “I
thought it could, I thought it could. You’re evil, Alicia, as you know, because a woman touched you, for
years she handled you. But not Evelyn... it’s in the blood and the blood must be let. Where is she, do you
think?”
“Perhaps outdoors... the pool, that will be it. She likes the pool. I’ll go with you.”
He looked at her, her hot face, bright eyes. “This is for me to do. Stay here!”
“Please...”
He whirled the heavy-handled whip. “You too, Alicia?”
She half turned from him, biting into a huge excitement. “Later,” he growled. He ran out.
Alicia stood a moment trembling, then plunged to the window. She saw her father outside, striding
purposefully away. Her hands spread and curled against the sash. Her lips writhed apart and she uttered a
strange wordless bleat.
When Evelyn reached the pool, she was out of breath. Something—an invisible smoke, a magic—lay over
the water. She took it in hungrily, and was filled with a sense of nearness. Whether it was a thing which
was near or an event, she did not know; but it was near and she welcomed it. Her nostrils arched and
trembled. She ran to the water’s edge and reached out towards it.
There was a boiling in the upstream end, and up from under the holly stems he came. He thrashed to
the bank and lay there gasping, looking up at her. He was wide and flat, covered with scratches. His hands
were puffy and water-wrinkled; he was gaunt and worn. Shreds of clothing clung to him here and there,
covering him not at all.
She leaned over him, spellbound, and from her came the call—floods of it, loneliness and expectancy
and hunger, gladness and sympathy. There was a great amazement in her but no shock and no surprise.
She had been aware of him for days and he of her, and now their silent radiations reached out to each
other, mixed and mingled and meshed. Silently they lived in each other and then she bent and touched
him, touched his face and shaggy hair.
He trembled violently, and kicked his way up out of the water. She sank down beside him. They sat
close together, and at last she met those eyes. The eyes seemed to swell up and fill the air; she wept for
joy and sank forward into them, wanting to live there, perhaps to die there, but at very least to be a part of
them.
She had never spoken to a man and he had never spoken to anyone. She did not know what a kiss
was, and any he might have seen had no significance to him. But they had a better thing. They stayed
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close, one of her hands on his bare shoulder, and the currents of their inner selves surged between them.
They did not hear her father’s resolute footsteps, nor his gasp, nor his terrible bellow of outrage. They
were aware of nothing but each other until he leapt on them, caught her up, lifted her high, threw her
behind him. He did not look to see where or how she struck the ground. He stood over the idiot, his lips
white, his eyes staring. His lips parted and again he made the terrible sound. And then he lifted the whip.
So dazed was the idiot that the first multiple blow, and the second, seemed not to affect him at all,
though his flesh, already soaked and cut and beaten, split and spouted. He lay staring dully at that midair
point which had contained Evelyn’s eyes and did not move.
Then the lashes whistled and clacked and buried their braided tips in his back again and the old reflex
returned to him. He pressed himself backward trying to slide feet-first into the water. The man dropped
his whip and caught the idiot’s bony wrist in both his hands. He literally ran a dozen steps up the bank,
the idiot’s long tattered body flailing along behind him. He kicked the creature’s head, ran back for his
whip. When he returned with it the idiot had managed to rear up on his elbows. The man kicked him
again, rolled him over on his back. He put one foot on the idiot’s shoulder and pinned him down and
slashed at the naked belly with the whip.
There was a devil’s shriek behind him and it was as if a bullock with tiger’s claws had attacked him.
He fell heavily and twisted, to look up into the crazed face of his younger daughter. She had bitten her
lips and she drooled and bled. She clawed at his face; one of her fingers slipped into his left eye. He
screamed in agony, sat up, twined his fingers in the complexity of lace at her throat, and clubbed her
twice with the loaded whip-handle.
Blubbering, whining, he turned to the idiot again. But now the implacable demands of escape had
risen, flushing away everything else. And perhaps another thing was broken as the whip-handle crushed
the consciousness from the girl. In any case there was nothing left but escape, and there could be nothing
else until it was achieved. The long body flexed like a snap-beetle, flung itself up and over in a half-
somersault. The idiot struck the bank on all fours and sprang as he struck. The lash caught him in midair;
his flying body curled around it, for a brief instant capturing the lashes between the lower ribs and the
hipbone. The handle slipped from the man’s grasp. He screamed and dove after the idiot, who plunged
into the arch at the holly roots. The man’s face buried itself in the leaves and tore; he sank and surged
forward again in the water. With one hand he caught a naked foot. It kicked him on the ear as he pulled it
towards him. And then the man’s head struck the iron pickets.
The idiot was under and through already and lay half out of the brook, twitching feebly in an
exhausted effort to bring his broken body to its feet. He turned to look back and saw the man clinging to
the bars, raging, not understanding about the underwater gap in the fence.
The idiot clung to the earth, pink bloody water swirling away from him and down on his pursuer.
Slowly the escape reflex left him. There was a period of blankness and then a strange new feeling came to
him. It was as new an experience as the call which had brought him here and very nearly as strong. It was
a feeling like fear, but where fear was a fog to him, clammy and blinding, this was something with a
thirsty edge to it, hard and purposeful.
He relaxed his grasp on the poisoned weeds which grew sickly in the leached ground by the brook.
He let the water help him and drifted down again to the bars, where the insane father mouthed and
yammered at him. He brought his dead face close to the fence and widened his eyes. The screaming
stopped.
For the first time he used the eyes consciously, purposely, for something other than a crust of bread.
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When the man was gone he dragged himself out of the brook and, faltering, crawled towards the
woods.
When Alicia saw her father returning she put the heel of her hand in her mouth and bit down until her
teeth met. It was not his clothes, wet and torn, nor even his ruined eye. It was something else, something
which—“Father!”
He did not answer, but strode up to her. At the last possible instant before being walked down like a
wheat stalk, she numbly stepped aside. He stamped past her and through the library doors, leaving them
open. “Father!”
No answer. She ran to the library. He was across the room, at the cabinets which she had never seen
open. One was open now. From it he took a long-barrelled target revolver and a small box of cartridges.
This he opened, spilling the cartridges across his desk. Methodically he began to load.
Alicia ran to him. “What is it? What is it? You’re hurt, let me help you, what are you...”
His one good eye was fixed and glassy. He breathed slowly, too deeply, the air rushing in for too
long, being held for too long, whistling out and out. He snapped the cylinder into place, clicked off the
safety, looked at her, and raised the gun.
She was never to forget that look. Terrible things happened then and later, but time softened the
focus, elided the details. But that look was to be with her for ever.
He fixed the one eye on her, caught and held her with it; she squirmed on it like an impaled insect.
She knew with a horrifying certainty that he did not see her at all, but looked at some unknowable horror
of his own. Still looking through her, he put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
There was not much noise. His hair fluffed upward on top. The eye still stared, she was still pierced
by it. She screamed his name. He was no less reachable dead than he had been a moment before. He bent
forward as if to show her the ruin which had replaced his hair and the thing that held her broke, and she
ran.
Two hours, two whole hours passed before she found Evelyn. One of the hours was simply lost; it
was a blackness and a pain. The other was too quiet, a time of wandering about the house followed by a
soft little whimpering that she made herself: “What?” she whimpered, “what’s that you say?” trying to
understand, asking and asking the quiet house for the second hour.
She found Evelyn by the pool, lying on her back with her eyes wide open. On the side of Evelyn’s
head was a puffiness, and in the centre of the puffiness was a hollow into which she could have laid three
fingers.
“Don’t,” said Evelyn softly when Alicia tried to lift her head. Alicia set it back gently and knelt and
took her hands and squeezed them together. “Evelyn, oh, what happened?”
“Father hit me,” Evelyn said calmly. “I’m going to go to sleep.”
Alicia whimpered.
Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a... person... when you want to be touched and
the... two are like one thing and there isn’t anything else at all anywhere?”
Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length. She swallowed. “It’s a
madness. It’s bad.”
Evelyn’s quiet face was suffused with a kind of wisdom. “It isn’t bad,” she said. “I had it.”
“You have to get back to the house.”
“I’ll sleep here,” said Evelyn. She looked up at her sister and smiled. “It’s all right... Alicia?”
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More Than Human
“Yes.”
“I won’t ever wake up,” she said with that strange wisdom. “I wanted to do something and now I
can’t. Will you do it for me?”
“I’ll do it,” Alicia whispered.
“For me,” Evelyn insisted. “You won’t want to.”
“I’ll do it.”
“When the sun is bright,” Evelyn said, “take a bath in it. There’s more, wait.” She closed her eyes. A
little furrow came and went on her brow. “Be in the sun like that. Move, run. Run and... jump high. Make
a wind with running and moving. I so wanted that. I didn’t know until now that I wanted it and now I...
oh, Alicia!”
“What is it, what is it?”
“There it is, there it is, can’t you see? The love, with the sun on its body!”
The soft wise eyes were wide, looking at the darkling sky. Alicia looked up and saw nothing. When
she looked down again, she knew that Evelyn was also seeing nothing. Not any more.
Far off, in the woods beyond the fence, there was a rush of weeping.
Alicia stayed there listening to it and at last put out her hand and closed Evelyn’s eyes. She rose and
went towards the house and the weeping followed her and followed her, almost until she reached the
door. And even then it seemed to go on inside her.
When Mrs Prodd heard the hoof thuds in the yard, she muttered under her breath and peered out between
the dimity kitchen curtains. By a combination of starlight and deep familiarity with the yard itself, she
discerned the horse and stoneboat, with her husband plodding beside it, coming through the gate. He’ll
get what for, she mumbled, off to the woods so long and letting her burn dinner.
He didn’t get what for, though. One look at his broad face precluded it. “What is it, Prodd?” she
asked, alarmed.
“Gimme a blanket.”
“Why on earth—”
“Hurry now. Feller bad hurt. Picked him up in the woods. Looks like a bear chewed him. Got the
clo’es ripped off him.”
She brought the blanket, running, and he snatched it and went out. In a moment he was back, carrying
a man. “Here,” said Mrs Prodd. She flung open the door to Jack’s room. When Prodd hesitated, the long
limp body dangling in his arms, she said, “Go on, go on, never mind the spread. It’ll wash.”
“Get a rag, hot water,” he grunted. She went out and he gently lifted off the blanket. “Oh my God.”
He stopped her at the door. “He won’t last the night. Maybe we shouldn’t plague him with that.” He
indicated the steaming basin she carried.
“We got to try.” She went in. She stopped and he deftly took the basin from her as she stood, white-
faced, her eyes closed. “Ma—”
“Come,” she said softly. She went to the bed and began to clean the tattered body.
He lasted the night. He lasted the week too, and it was only then that the Prodds began to have hope
for him. He lay motionless in the room called Jack’s room, interested in nothing, aware of nothing except
perhaps the light as it came and went at the window. He would stare out as he lay, perhaps seeing,
perhaps watching, perhaps not. There was little to be seen out there. A distant mountain, a few of Prodd’s
sparse acres; occasionally Prodd himself, a doll in the distance, scratching the stubborn soil with a broken
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摘要：

MoreThanHumanMORETHANHUMANPart1:TheFabulousIdiotPart2:BabyIsThreePart3:MoralityPartOne:TheFabulousIdiotTheidiotlivedinablackandgrayworld,punctuatedbythewhitelight ingofhungerandthenickeringoffear.Hisclotheswereoldandmany-windowed.Herepeepedashinbone,sharpasacoldchisel,andthereinthetorncoatwereribs...

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