Thorns Read online

  Entering the lobby, he slipped and began to fall.

  That had been happening to him more and more, now that he was out in public. He had never really learned how to use his legs. His knees were elaborate ball-and-socket affairs, evidently designed to be frictionless, and at unpredictable moments they failed to support him. That was what happened now. There was a sensation as of his left leg disintegrating, and he began to slide toward the thick yellow carpet.

  Vigilant robot bellhops sprang to his aid. Aoudad, whose reflexes were not quite as good as theirs, belatedly clutched at him. But Lona was closest. She flexed her knees and put her shoulder against his chest, supporting him while he clawed for balance. Burris was surprised at how strong she was. She held him up until the others reached him.

  “Are you all right?” she asked breathlessly.

  “More or less.” He swung his leg back and forth until he was sure the knee was locked in place again. Fiery pains shot as high as his hip. “You were strong. You held me up.”

  “It all happened so fast. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just moved and there you were.”

  “I’m so heavy, though.”

  Aoudad had been holding him by the arm. As if slowly realizing it, he let go. “Can you make it by yourself now?” he asked. “What happened?”

  “I forgot how my legs worked for a second,” Burris said. The pain was nearly blinding. He swallowed it down and, taking Lona’s hand, slowly led the procession toward the gravitron bank. Nikolaides was taking care of the routine job of checking them in. They would be here two days. Aoudad entered the nearest liftshaft with them, and up they went.

  “Eighty-two,” Aoudad said to the elevator’s monitor-plate.

  “Is it a big room?” Lona asked.

  “It’s a suite,” said Aoudad. “It’s lots of rooms.”

  There were seven rooms altogether. A cluster of bedrooms, a kitchen, a lounging room, and a large conference room in which the representatives of the press would later gather. At Burris’s quiet request, he and Lona had been given adjoining bedrooms. There was nothing physical between them yet. Burris knew that the longer he waited, the more difficult it would be, and yet he held back. He could not judge the depth of her feelings, and at this point he had grave doubts about his own.

  Chalk had spared no expense to get them these accommodations. It was a lavish suite, hung with outworld draperies that throbbed and flickered with inner light. The spun-glass ornaments on the table, warmed in the hand, would sing sweet melodies. They were costly. The bed in his room was wide enough to hold a regiment. Hers was round and revolved at the touch of a switch. There were mirrors in the bedroom ceilings. At an adjustment, they contorted into diamond facets; at another, they became splintered shards; at another, they provided a steady reflection, larger and sharper than life. They could also be opaqued. Burris did not doubt that the rooms could play other tricks as well.

  “Dinner tonight is in the Galactic Room,” Aoudad announced. “You’ll hold a press conference at eleven tomorrow morning. You meet with Chalk in the afternoon. The following morning you leave for the Pole.”

  “Splendid.” Burris sat.

  “Shall I have a doctor up to look at the leg?”

  “It won’t be necessary.”

  “I’ll be back in an hour and a half to escort you to dinner. You’ll find clothes in the closets.”

  Aoudad took his leave.

  Lona’s eyes were shining. She was in wonderland. Burris himself, not easily impressed by luxury, was at least interested in the extent of the comforts. He smiled at her. Her glow deepened. He winked.

  “Let’s look around again,” she murmured.

  They toured the suite. Her room, his, the kitchen. She touched the program node of the food bank. “We could eat here tonight,” he suggested. “If you prefer, we can get everything we need.”

  “Let’s go out, though.”

  “Of course.”

  He did not need to shave, nor even to wash: small mercies of his new skin. But Lona was more nearly human. He left her in her room, staring at the vibraspray mounted in its cubicle. Its control panel was nearly as complex as that of a starship. Well, let her play with it.

  He inspected his wardrobe.

  They had stocked him as though he were going to be the star of a tridim drama. On one shelf were some twenty spray on cans, each with its bright portrayal of its contents. In this one, green dinner jacket and lustrous purple-threaded tunic. In this, a single flowing robe decked with self-generating light. Here, a gaudy peacock thing with epaulets and jutting ribs. His own tastes ran to simpler designs, even to more conventional materials. Linen, cotton, the ancient fabrics. But his private tastes did not govern this enterprise. Left to his private tastes, he would be huddling in his flaking room in the Martlet Towers, talking to his own ghost. Here he was, a volunteer puppet dancing on Chalk’s strings, and he had to dance the proper paces. This was his purgatory. He chose the epaulets and ribs.

  Now, would the sprayon work?

  His skin was strange in its porosity and other physical properties. It might reject the garment. Or—a waking nightmare—it might patiently undo the clinging molecules, so that in the twinkling of an eye his clothing shredded at the Galactic Room, leaving him not merely naked in a throng but exposed in all his eerie otherness. He would chance it. Let them look. Let them see everything. The image crossed his mind of Elise Prolisse putting a hand to a secret stud and obliterating her black shroud in an instant, unveiling the white temptations. These clothes were unreliable. So be it. Burris stripped and inserted the sprayon can in the dispenser. He stepped beneath it.

  Cunningly the garment shaped itself to his body.

  The application took less than five minutes. Surveying his gaudiness in a mirror, Burris was not displeased. Lona would be proud of him.

  He waited for her.

  Nearly an hour went by. He heard nothing from her room. Surely she must be ready by now. “Lona?” he called, and got no answer.

  Panic speared him. This girl was suicide-prone. The pomp and elegance of this hotel might be just enough to tip her over the brink. They were a thousand feet above the ground here; she would not botch this attempt. I should never have left her alone, Burris told himself fiercely.

  “Lona!”

  He stepped through the widening partition into her room. Instantly he saw her and went numb with relief. She was in her closet, naked, her back to him. Narrow across the shoulders, narrower through the hips, so that the contrast of the narrow waist was lost. The spine rose like a subterranean burrow, steeply, shadowed. The buttocks were boyish. He regretted his intrusion. “I didn’t hear you,” he said. “I was worried, and so when you didn’t answer—”

  She turned to him, and Burris saw that she had much more on her mind than her violated modesty. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her cheeks streaked. In a token of pudicity she lifted a thin arm across her small breasts, but the gesture was purely automatic and hid nothing. Her lips trembled. Beneath his outer skin he felt the shock of her body’s impact, and he found himself wondering why so underfurnished a nudity should affect him this way. Because, he decided, it had lain beyond a barrier that now was shattered.

  “Oh, Minner, Minner, I was ashamed to call you! I’ve been standing here for half an hour!”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “There’s nothing for me to wear!”

  He came closer. She turned aside, backing from the closet, standing by his elbow and lowering the arm over her breasts. He peered into the closet. Dozens of sprayon cans were decked there. Fifty, a hundred of them.

  “So?”

  “I can’t wear those!”

  He picked one up. From the picture on the label it was a thing of night and fog, elegant, chaste, superb.

  “Why can’t you?”

  “I want something simple. There’s nothing simple here.”

  “Simple? For the Galactic Room?”

  “I’m afraid, Minner.”

&
nbsp; And she was. The bare skin was goosebumped.

  “You can be such a child sometimes!” he snapped.

  The words fishhooked into her. She shrank back, looking more naked than ever, and fresh tears slipped from her eyes. The cruelty of the words seemed to linger in the room, like a silty deposit, after the words themselves were gone.

  “If I’m a child,” she said hoarsely, “why am I going to the Galactic Room?”

  Take her in your arms? Comfort her? Burris was caught in wild eddies of uncertainty. He geared his voice for something that lay midway between parental anger and phony solicitousness and said, “Don’t be foolish, Lona. You’re an important person. The whole world is going to look at you tonight and say how beautiful, how lucky you are. Put on something Cleopatra would have loved. And then tell yourself you’re Cleopatra.”

  “Do I look like Cleopatra?”

  His eyes traveled her body. That was, he sensed, exactly what she wanted them to do. And he had to concede that she was less than voluptuous. Which perhaps she also sought to engineer from him. Yet, in her slight way, she was attractive. Even womanly. She shuttled between impish girlhood and neurotic womanhood.

  “Pick one of these and put it on,” he said. “You’ll blossom to match. Don’t be uneasy about it. Here I am in this insane costume, and I think it’s wildly funny. You’ve got to match me. Go ahead.”

  “That’s the other trouble. There are so many. I can’t pick!”

  She had a point there. Burris stared into the closet. The choice was overwhelming. Cleopatra herself would have been dizzied, and this poor waif was stunned. He fished about uncomfortably, hoping to land on something that would instantly proclaim its suitability for Lona. But none of these garments had been designed for waifs, and so long as he persisted in thinking of her as one, he could make no selection. At last he came back to the one he had grabbed at random, the elegant and chaste one. “This,” he said. “I think this is just right.”

  She looked doubtfully at the label. “I’d feel embarrassed in anything so fancy.”

  “We’ve dealt with that theme already, Lona. Put it on.”

  “I can’t use the machine. I don’t know how.”

  “It’s the simplest thing in the world!” he burst out, and cursed himself for the ease with which he slipped into hectoring inflections with her. “The instructions are right on the can. You put the can in the slot—”

  “Do it for me.”

  He did it for her. She stood in the dispenser zone, slim and pale and naked, while the garment issued forth in a fine mist and wrapped itself about her. Burris began to suspect that he had been manipulated, and rather adroitly at that. In one giant bound they had crossed the barrier of nudity, and now she showed herself to him as casually as though she were his wife of decades. Seeking his advice on clothing. Forcing him to stand by while she pirouetted beneath the dispenser, cloaking herself in elegance. The little witch! He admired the technique. The tears, the huddled bare body, the poor-little-girl approach. Or was he reading into her panic far more than was to be found there? Perhaps. Probably.

  “How do I look?” she asked, stepping forth.

  “Magnificent.” He meant it. “There’s the mirror. Decide for yourself.”

  Her glow of pleasure was worth several kilowatts. Burris decided he had been all wrong about her motives; she was less complicated than that, had been genuinely terrified by the prospect of elegance, now was genuinely delighted at the ultimate effect.

  Which was superb. The dispenser nozzle had spawned a gown that was not quite diaphanous, not quite skin-tight. It clung to her like a cloud, veiling the slender thighs and sloping shoulders and artfully managing to suggest a voluptuousness that was not there at all. No one wore undergarments with a spray on outfit, and so the bare body lay just fractionally out of sight; but the designers were cunning, and the loose drape of this gown enhanced and amplified its wearer. The colors, too, were delicious. Through some molecular magic the polymers were not tied strongly to one segment of the spectrum. As Lona moved the gown changed hue readily, sliding from dawn-gray to the blue of a summer sky, and thence to black, iron-brown, pearl, mauve.

  Lona took on the semblance of sophistication that the garment provided her. She seemed taller, older, more alert, surer of herself. She held her shoulders up, and her breasts thrust forward in surprising transfiguration.

  “Do you like it?” she asked softly.

  “It’s wonderful, Lona.”

  “I feel so strange in it. I’ve never worn anything like this. Suddenly I’m Cinderella going to the ball!”

  “With Duncan Chalk as your fairy godmother?”

  They laughed. “I hope he turns into a pumpkin at midnight,” she said. She moved toward the mirror. “Minner, I’ll be ready in another five minutes, all right?”

  He returned to his own room. She needed not five minutes but fifteen to cleanse the evidence of tears from her face, but he forgave her. When she finally appeared, he scarcely recognized her. She had prettied her face to a burnished glamour that virtually transformed her. The eyes were rimmed now with shining dust; the lips gleamed in lush phosphorescence; ear-clips of gold covered her ears. She drifted like a wisp of morning mist into his room. “We can go now,” she said throatily.

  Burris was pleased and amused. In one sense, she was a little girl dressed up to look like a woman. In another, she was a woman just beginning to discover that she was no longer a girl. Had the chrysalis really opened yet? In any case he enjoyed the sight of her this way. She was certainly lovely. Perhaps fewer people would look at him, more at her.

  They headed for the dropshaft together.

  Just before he left his room, he notified Aoudad that he and Lona were coming down for dinner. Then they descended. Burris felt a wild surge of fear and grimly quelled it. This would be his most public exposure since his return to Earth. Dinner at the restaurant of restaurants; his strange face perhaps souring the caviar of a thousand fellow diners; eyes turned to him from all sides. He looked at it as a test. Somehow he drew strength from Lona and put on a cloak of courage as she had put on her unfamiliar finery.

  When they reached the lobby, Burris heard the quick sighs of the onlookers. Pleasure? Awe? The frisson of delighted revulsion? He could not read their motives from their hissing uptake of air. Yet they were looking, and responding, to the strange pair who had emerged from the dropshaft.

  Burris, Lona on his arm, kept his face taut. Get a good look at us, he thought sharply. The couple of the century, we are. The mutilated starman and the hundred-baby virgin mother. The show of the epoch.

  They were looking, all right. Burris felt the eyetracks crossing his earless jaw, passing over his click-click eyelids and his rearranged mouth. He astounded himself by his own lack of response to their vulgar curiosity. They were looking at Lona, too, but she had less to offer them, since her scars were inward ones.

  Suddenly there was commotion to Burris’s left.

  An instant later Elise Prolisse burst from the crowd and hurtled toward him, crying harshly, “Minner! Minner!”

  She looked like a she-berserker. Her face was bizarrely painted in a wild and monstrous parody of adornment: blue cheekstripes, red flanges over her eyes. She had shunned sprayon and wore a gown of some rustling, seductive natural fabric, cut low to reveal the milk-white globes of her breasts. Hands tipped with shining claws were outstretched.

  “I’ve tried to get to you,” she panted. “They wouldn’t let me near you. They—”

  Aoudad cut toward them. “Elise—”

  She slashed his cheek with her nails. Aoudad reeled back, cursing, and Elise turned to Burris. She looked venom at Lona. She tugged at Burris’s arm and said, “Come away with me. Now that I’ve found you again I won’t let go.”

  “Get your hand off him!” From Lona. The syllables tipped with whirling blades.

  The older woman glared at the girl. Burris, baffled, thought they would fight. Elise weighed at least forty pounds more than
Lona, and, as Burris had good reason to know, she was fiercely strong. But Lona had unsuspected strengths, too.

  A scene in the lobby, he thought with curious clarity. Nothing will be spared us.

  “I love him, you little bitch!” Elise cried hoarsely.

  Lona did not answer. But her hand moved out in a quick chopping gesture toward Elise’s outstretched arm. Edge of hand collided with fleshy forearm in a quick crack. Elise hissed. She pulled back her arm. The hands formed claws again. Lona, squaring away, flexed her knees and was ready to leap.

  All this had taken only seconds. Now the startled bystanders moved. Burris himself, after early paralysis, Stepped in the way and shielded Lona from Elise’s fury. Aoudad seized one of Elise’s arms. She tried to pull it free, and her bare breasts quivered in the effort. Nikolaides moved in on the other side. Elise screamed, kicked, pulled. A circle of robot bellhops had formed. Burris watched as they dragged Elise away.

  Lona leaned against an onyx pillar. Her face was deeply flushed, but otherwise not even her makeup was disarranged. She looked more startled than frightened.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  “Elise Prolisse. The widow of one of my shipmates.”

  “What did she want?”

  “Who knows?” Burris lied.

  Lona was not fooled. “She said she loved you.”

  “It’s her privilege. I guess she’s been under great stress.”

  “I saw her in the hospital. She visited you.” Green flames of jealousy flickered across Lona’s face. “What does she want from you? Why did she make that scene?”

  Aoudad came to his rescue. Holding a cloth to his bloodied cheek, he said, “We’ve given her a sedative. She won’t bother you again. I’m terribly sorry about this. A silly, hysterical fool of a woman—”

  “Let’s go back upstairs,” said Lona. “I don’t feel like eating in the Galactic Room now.”

  “Oh, no,” Aoudad said. “Don’t cancel out. I’ll give you a relaxer and you’ll feel better in no time. You mustn’t let a stupid episode like that spoil a wonderful evening.”

  “At least let’s get out of the lobby,” Burris said shortly.