A Saucer of Loneliness by Theodore Sturgeon

joy in the contact never lessened, it was a shadowed pleasure, a lachrymose beauty like the wrenching music of the wailing wall.
    The RS drive laid its hand on the moon and they vaulted away. Grunty came up from blackout to find it very quiet. The loverbirds lay still in each other’s arms, looking very human except for the high joining of their closed eyelids, which nictated upward rather than downward like a Terran’s. Rootes sprawled limply on the other couch, and Grunty nodded at the sight. He deeply appreciated the silence, since Rootes had filled the small cabin with earthy chatter about his conquests in port, detail by hairy detail, for two solid hours preceding their departure. It was a routine which Grunty found particularly wearing, partly for its content, which interested him not at all, but mostly for its inevitability. Grunty had long ago noted that these recitations, for all their detail, carried the tones of thirst rather than of satiety. He had his own conclusions about it, and, characteristically, kept them to himself. But inside, his spinning gusts of words could shape themselves well to it, and they did. “And man, she moaned!” Rootes would chant. “And take money? She
gave
me money. And what did I do with it? Why, I bought up some more of the same.”
And what you could buy with a shekel’s worth of tenderness, my prince!
his silent words sang. “… across the floor and around the rug until, by damn, I thought we’re about to climb the wall. Loaded, Grunty-boy, I tell you, I was loaded!”
Poor little one
ran the hushed susurrus,
thy poverty is as great as thy joy and a tenth as great as thine empty noise
. One of Grunty’s greatest pleasures was taken in the fact that this kind of chuntering was limited to the first day out, with barely another word on the varied theme until the next departure, no matter how many months away that might be.
Squeak to me of love, dear mouse
, his words would chuckle.
Stand up on
your cheese and nibble away at your dream
. Then, wearily,
But oh, this treasure I carry is too heavy a burden, in all its fullness, to be so tugged at by your clattering vacuum!
    Grunty left the couch and went to the controls. The preset courses checked against the indicators. He logged them and fixed the finder control to locate a certain mass-nexus in the Crab Nebula. It would chime when it was ready. He set the switch for final closing by the push-button beside his couch, and went aft to wait.
    He stood watching the loverbirds because there was nothing else for him to do.
    They lay quite still, but love so permeated them that their very poses expressed it. Their lax bodies yearned each to each, and the tall one’s hand seemed to stream toward the fingers of his beloved, and then back again, like the riven tatters of a torn fabric straining toward oneness again. And as their mood was a sadness too, so their pose, each and both, together and singly, expressed it, and singly each through the other silently spoke of the loss they had suffered, and how it ensured greater losses to come. Slowly the picture suffused Grunty’s thinking, and his words picked and pierced and smoothed it down and murmured finally,
Brush away the dusting of sadness from the future, bright ones. You’ve sadness enough for now. Grief should live only after it is truly born, and not before
.
    His words sang,
    Come fill the cup and in the fire of spring
    Your winter garment of repentance fling.
    The bird of time has but a little way
    To flutter—and the bird is on the wing
.
    and added
Omar Khayyam, born circa 1073
, for this, too, was one of the words’ functions.
    And then he stiffened in horror; his great hands came up convulsively and clawed the imprisoning glass …
    They were smiling at him.
    They were smiling, and on their faces and on and about their bodies there was no sadness.
    They had
heard
him!
    He glanced convulsively around at the Captain’s unconscious form, then back to the loverbirds.
    That