Charles Sheffield - Starfire

In conventional tests of knowledge and speed of comprehension, I am not boasting when I say that I score well outside the range where such measurements are deemed useful. If I seemed slow to understand what she was saying, it is only that we were beyond my parameters not only of experience but of acceptance.

“Your mother brought a man home to sleep with her last night?” I said.

“Right. Flush, by the sound of him.”

“And you’ve been out here ever since?”

“Oh, no.” She rubbed the blood-orange glass marble against her blouse and peered at it anxiously for damage. “I only come out here a couple of hours ago, when they woke me up. My bed’s right up against the wall and they was making too much noise.” She stared at me and added, apparently in defense of her mother,

“They was both pretty high, I could tell soon as they come in.”

“So when will you go back?”

She pulled a face. “Can go in anytime I want. But I don’t want. Where you going now?”

It was chilly, with a brisk wind swirling around the street corner. I became aware of how hungry I felt. I had eaten nothing since the previous afternoon.

“I’m heading home, for a hot breakfast,” I said. “It’s not far from here. If you don’t want to go home and you would like to eat, you can come with me.”

She took a step closer and looked up at me with eyes too knowing for her age. “Breakfast. That all?”

“It’s all I’m offering.”

“Yeah. Well, okay. Breakfast.”

“Don’t you need to tell your mother?”

“Tell her what? She isn’t invited, is she?”

“No.”

“Anyway, she never eats when she’s working.” She stuffed the marbles into a pocket of the long brown skirt. “Ready when you are.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Paula. Paula Searle.”

“I’m Oliver. Oliver Guest.”

“Pleased to meet you,” she said calmly. The scream or gasp of horror that invariably followed the mention of my name would not occur until five years later. She reached out, her small hand swallowed up in mine for a formal handshake. “You must have a rotten job if it keeps you up all night. What do you do?”

We began to walk side by side, I deliberately shortening my step to fit hers. There seemed little chance that she would comprehend any element of my work, but we had six long blocks to walk. I told her of my own background in biology. I started to explain the nature and causes of apoptosis, the preprogrammed death that comes to most (but not all) cells of an organism. I spoke more for my benefit than hers-my mental review of the previous night’s work had been interrupted by our chance meeting-and I made no attempt to talk down to her or to simplify the intrinsically complex biochemistry.

She said nothing, and after a couple of minutes brought a couple of marbles from her pocket and began to chink them together. I assumed that she had stopped listening, until suddenly she said, “It all happens from inside, don’t it, like the cell’s wearing out? I mean, it’s not like a virus or something gets in and kills it.”

Paula Searle, in thirty seconds, made real and tangible a truth that I had previously known only intellectually: Just as mental slowness occurs no less frequently in those of royal descent (more frequently, some would say, with an argument based on sound genetic principles), so intelligence and talent and quickness of wit may surface in the deepest despairing depths of society.

Paula was bright.

We walked, we talked, we came to my building and went up. I cooked while Paula explored the small apartment and made derogatory comments concerning my inadequate wardrobe and rickety table and total lack of entertainment facilities. She had removed the dark blouse and dowdy wraparound skirt that mimicked Scantling attire, and was now revealed in brief shorts and a T-shirt of pale yellow. With her coltish limbs and liquid dark eyes, she danced and skipped between the two rooms of my apartment and brightened any spot upon which she lighted.

At one point she sang a Scantling hymn, “The Narrow Gate of Heaven.” She had a small, true voice, and I listened with pleasure until I realized that the song was a parody, the same tune but with words of sexual innuendo and details of illegal surgery to make you shudder.

“Don’t sing that,” I said.

She paused in her wandering and stared at me in surprise. “Sorry. I know somebody had it done to her, just like in the song. But if it makes you too hot, I’ll stop.”

“Please.” But I wondered, could she be right? I was in truth oddly excited, although not in any way that I could relate to my previous sexual experiences.

Even with distractions, I am a good cook. When we ate-her reaction to my food and my cooking were positive-l asked more about her background. How old was she, how long had they been living where they were now, where had she been before that, did she have other relatives in Atlanta, where was her father?

I was making conversation, easily and naturally. Just as when we had finished eating, she, easily and naturally, went through to sprawl across my bed while I cleaned up.

It took me no more than five minutes. When I came through to ask if she now was ready to go back home, she was sound asleep.

It seemed wrong to wake her. I moved a soft chair in from the other room and sat down. She had in her answers to my questions revealed an appallingly adult knowledge of the world. Her mother had moved from Norfolk four months ago. They had become afraid when Paula’s “father” was killed in an argument over stolen goods from a warehouse raid. Paula and her mother were not registered, so she had not been able to go to school for over a year. When she was older — not much older, though she was not sure how much-she would help earn her keep. Not with men like her mother brought home, Mother promised her that, but with ones young and nice. But-her red-rose mouth stretched wide in a grimace-you’d be a fool to believe that, wouldn’t you?

I looked down at her. In sleep, all her cynicism vanished and only innocence remained. Here was a beautiful and intelligent child, on the brink of becoming a woman. The world ought to be opening out before her in all its glory and diversity, but that would never happen. Not to little Paula. The narrow gate of heaven had for her already closed. She was the loveliest thing I had ever seen, with grace and brains and talent far beyond the women with whom I had made love, but already she was tainted and blighted. “ That which is marred at birth, time will not mend.”

I did not intend to sleep, nor did I make plans before I slept. Nor, while I slept, did I dream. And yet, when I awoke soon after noon, the idea-the resolve, the compulsion-was already formed in my mind, to the smallest detail of planning and execution. (Yes, yes, I know; let us not trivialize a life with a sniggering and obvious play on words.)

She would be missed, maybe in hours but possibly not for days. Her mother, as an unregistered resident of Atlanta wary of authority, might never report the disappearance; and if she did, what would any rational investigator conclude? Surely that Paula had chosen the unknown future of a runaway’s life over the sordid certainties of the present.

I waited two hours more, until Paula stirred and sat up and smiled at me. “Oliver Guest,” she said. “ Doctor Oliver Guest. Do you really work with all those animals and things like you said, or were you making it up?”

“I really do. And I must go back to work this afternoon. And you ought to go home to your mother.”

I am sure that I said those words. They sound as though I was faint-hearted, or suffering second thoughts. The reality was more complex. I wanted to believe, at some level, that Paula was my accomplice in what I planned to do, that it was her desire as well as mine. It would be, after all, to her ultimate benefit.