Vulcan’s Dolls by Margaret St. Clair

Book Details

Vulcan’s Dolls (1952) – The Weeping Doll lay on Fyon’s pink sands. When Don Haig picked it up, the cosmic battle between Vulcan and Mulciber would begin!

There was only one Vulcan’s weeping doll in the galaxy, maybe in the universe. It was in the big museum back on Earth. It was only displayed once every four or five years because of the reactions it had on the museum goers. But somehow Don Haig had found another on the pleasure planetoid of Fyon. Captivatingly beautiful, the doll wept. Whether just for him, or for all mankind, Don didn’t know. But Don did know why the SSP were hunting him – they wanted that weeping doll. For lurking behind the beauty of paradise was the brutality of a police state.

Vulcan’s Dolls is a novel of 18 chapters.

Margaret St. Clair (1911-1995) was an only child and described her childhood as “rather a lonely and bookish one.” St. Clair and her husband were well-traveled (including some visits to nudist colonies), were childless by choice, and in 1966 were initiated into Wicca, taking the Craft names Froniga and Weyland.

Vulcan’s Dolls contains 5 illustrations.

Available for and

1. VulcansDolls.epub

Excerpt: Vulcan’s Dolls

I

DON felt that time on Fyon was a tangible element. It seemed to drip down lazily from the dark fronds of the palm trees, to lie in languid pools under the pink and yellow petals of the frangipani. The trades blew steadily day after day on Fyon, warm and fresh and sweet-scented; and the palm trees, leaning their long slim trunks against the wind, seemed to be resisting time blowing past them. The pink sands of the beach were as smooth as velvet. The gentle waves wrote on them ceaselessly, like time writing and left them covered with an elegant calligraphy of long, sinuous ripple marks.

The botanists who had installed Fyon’s flora had spared no expense. Under the trees there were slender-podded vanilla orchids, hibiscus with long, poised stigmas and petals fantastically cut, double sampaguita flowers. There were ilangilang trees starred with drooping scented greenish blossoms, gardenias as high-centered as roses, champak, odorous kamuning. Sunset was brilliant over the palms, and so was morning, and each day was like the one before it, each round and unflawed and perfect as a pearl. It was no wonder that for weeks at a time Don was able to forget that Fyon was nothing but a synthetic pleasure-filled planetoid.

Worse than that, it was an unsuccessful one. The designers of the planetoid, for all their pains, had somehow missed the taste of the public. There was, it seemed, too much water, too little diversion. Space liners touched there rarely. There were few visitors. The machines that kept Fyon going—the fall of rain, the motion of air, the waves rippling against the beach—ran only because, keeping them going was cheaper than shutting them down would have been.

That morning Don Haig woke unwillingly. For a long time, in his light slumber, he had been conscious of the arthritic pains in his ankles and elbows, of the itching of the sand against his shoulders, of the nausea spreading miserably through his diaphragm and chest. Day was a question he did not want to have to answer. He moaned and burrowed and tried to go back to sleep again. But he was cold and shivering; even with the warm sand against him he was cold. He roused himself at last.

He sat up in the sand, dodging, with the ease of much practice, the slantwise piece of corrugated iron that served him as roof. He yawned and shivered and yawned again. A drink would have helped his nausea, but it had been so long since he had had the luxury of a drink on first waking that he hardly formed the wish for it. He blinked the gum from his aching, unfocused eyes until he could see a little. Then he crawled out.

THE day was well advanced. From the angle of the palm trees shadows, it must be on the nearer side of noon. From an oleander a bird squawked shrilly. Don, licked his lips and shivered nervously. He would have liked a palm tree to hold on to. He began to undress.

He laid his clothing—a sleeveless undershirt and frayed white duck trousers —on the sand near his shelter. As always, he was a little ashamed of his ill cared-for, too-thin body. It was another unwanted, unmet responsibility. He waded out into the surf slowly, feeling the milk-smooth water float some of his misery away, and hoped that it wouldn’t make the pain in his joints worse.

When he came back from his bath he felt a little better. He picked up his clothing and, still naked, walked along the squeaking sand until he came to a particular spot on the beach. Then he turned and walked inward for perhaps fifty meters until he came to a fresh-water spring, one of the countless loving refinements the engineers, who had built Fyon had installed. The water flowed out clear and cool under the trees, across a bed of spotted agate pebbles and sweet-scented ferns.

Don Haig drank copiously. He drank again. He scooped up handfuls of the sweet water and slapped it over himself, rinsing away the salt. He didn’t want to get salt-water boils once more. He was still thirsty. Again he drank.

This time he vomited; He brought up nothing but clear fluid, but he was careful to move well away from the spring. When the spasm was over he was weak, but he really did feel better.

He walked toward the beach again. When the bland air had dried him, he dressed. He was surprised to find a tiny germ of hunger in himself. Food? Solid food? No, but perhaps coffee. And then, of course, a drink.

That wasn’t going to be easy. He smoothed his rough brown hair back frowning and trying to be intelligent. Fyon was outside the net of social services, and that meant that anything Don got on it had to be paid for with money. Who could he ask for money this morning? Kunitz?

Kunitz had yelled at him the last time he had asked, calling him a damned drunken nuisance. Don looked abstractedly at the lambda-shaped red birthmark on the inside of his left elbow, and laughed. It was accurate enough. Don was a nuisance even to himself.

After a moment he decided to walk along the beach and see if he could pick something up. It had worked twice, out of all the times he had tried it. Once he had found a beautiful pink shell, very unusual, and sold it to a tourist. The other time it had been an expensive watch somebody had dropped.

He set off, dragging his feet. He passed an unobtrusive robot gardener, busy weeding among the hibiscus, and thought for a moment of dismantling it and trying to sell the pieces. It was impractical; they’d only jail him, give him more psychotherapy, tell him he was happy. And there wasn’t any rum in jail.

HE WALKED a kilometer and a half up the long curving beach before he decided to go back. Would it have to be Kunitz, after all? Kunitz had liked him once. Don wished there was someone else to beg from beside him.

The long waves rolled in on the pink sands and were sucked back with a low roar. They broke with a prodigal display of foam, rich as pearls on the blue-green glinting of the water. Don watched for a second, divided between aesthetic appreciation and the categorically imperative need for a drink. Then he turned to take the path that led to Kunitz’ house.

At the last moment he halted, frowning. Had he seen a speck visible only between waves, at the water’s edge? He sighed, and then went creakily down to see what it was. When he thought of that discovery afterwards, he was always to remember that he had forgotten to roll up his trousers’ legs and had, in consequence, got them wet.

He had to wait for the wave to go back before he saw the object. Then he stooped and scrabbled with his fingers. What he had seen was round and small, and part of it was buried. The digging made his fingers hurt.

He pulled the object out of the sand with a sucking noise. He brushed wet sand from it with his shaky forefinger. It was—it was—

His knees were suddenly weak. He moved the few steps back to the beach and sat down. He brushed off more sand and stared at the thing he held.

She was small, no higher than the length of his hand. She was made of some golden, faintly luminous material, the color of a Gloire de Dijon rose, and to his fingers she had the mingled coolness and warmth of living flesh. Don looked at her with an exhausted, incredulous delight. She was the most beautiful thing he had seen in his life.

A woman, tiny, naked, perfect. Perfect with the perfection not of nature but of art, for a woman’s living body had no such harmony. No breathing woman ever had just that perfect slope of breast and cheek bone and hip. He held her in his hand, a marvel, a delight; and she was no bigger than the hand that held her. Her face was sad and compassionate. And down her cheeks there were flowing tiny, tiny tears.

Excerpt From: Margaret St. Clair. “Vulcan’s Dolls.”