A Saucer of Loneliness by Theodore Sturgeon

a hundred days just to show his strength would be a strong man indeed.”
    “What shall we do?”
    “I think we shall go out to the foothills in the morning and begin to build.”
    She rose and went to the door.
    “I know what to do now,” she whispered. “I won’t try to understand any more. I shall just go and help him.”
    “Yes, go,” said Wrenn. “He will need you.”
    Jubilith stood with Osser on the parapet, and with him stared into the dappled dawn. The whole sky flamed with the loom of the red sun’s light, but the white one preceded it up the sky, laying sharp shadows in the soft blunt ones. Birds called and chattered in the Sky-tree Grove, and deep in the thickets the seven-foot bats grunted as they settled in to sleep.
    “Suppose they don’t come?” she asked.
    “They’ll come,” he said grimly. “Jubilith, why are you here?”
    She said, “I don’t know what you are doing, Osser. I don’t know whether it’s right or whether you will keep on succeeding. I do know there will be pain and difficulty and I—I came to keep you safe, if I could … I love you.”
    He looked down at her, as thick and dark over her as his tower was over the foothills. One side of his mouth twitched.
    “Little butterfly,” he said softly, “do you think
you
can guard
me
?”
    Everything beautiful about her poured out to him through her beautiful face, and for a moment his world had three suns instead of two. He put his arms around her. Then his great voice exploded with two syllables of a mighty laugh. He lifted her and swung her behind him, and leaped to the parapet.
    Deeply shaken, she came to follow his gaze.
    The red sun’s foggy limb was above the townward horizon, and silhouetted against it came the van of a procession. On they came and on, the young men of the village, the fathers. Women were with them, too, and everything on wheels that the village possessed—flatbed wagons, two-wheeled rickshaw carts, children’s and vendors’ and pleasure vehicles. A snorting team of four tiger-oxen clawed along before a heavily laden stone-boat, and men shared packs thatswung in the center of long poles.
    Osser curled his lip. “You see them,” he said, as if to himself, “doing the only thing they can think of. Push them, they yield. The clods!” he spat. “Well, one day, one will push back. And when he does, I’ll break him, and after that I’ll use him. Meantime—I have a thousand hands and a single mind. We’ll see building now,” he crooned. “When they’ve built, they’ll know what they don’t know now—that they’re men.”
    “They’ve all come,” breathed Jubilith. “All of them. Osser—”
    “Be quiet,” he said, leaning into the wind to watch, gloating. With the feel of his hard hands still on her back, she discovered with a crushing impact that there was no room in his heart for her when he thought of his building. And she knew that there never would be, except perhaps for a stolen moment, a touch in passing. With the pain of that realization came the certainty that she would stay with him always, even for so little.
    The procession dipped out of sight, then slowly rose over and down the near hill and approached the tower. It spread and thickened at the foot of the slope, as men cast about, testing the ground with their picks, eying the land for its color and vegetation and drainage … or was that what they were doing?
    Osser leaned his elbows on the parapet and shook his head pityingly at their inefficiency. Look at the way they went about laying out houses! And their own houses. Well, he’d let them mill about until they were completely confused, and then he’d go down and make them do it his way. Confused men are soft men; men working against their inner selves are easy to divert from outside.
    Beside him, Jubilith gasped.
    “What is it?”
    She pointed. “There—sending the men to this side, that side. See, by the stone-boat? It’s Wrenn!”
    “Nonsense!” said Osser.