Thorns Read online

  They looked trapped. Blonde wife was nearly panicky. Suave husband deftly came to rescue.

  “We’d love to…other arrangements…friends from back home…perhaps another night…”

  The tables were not limited to four or even six. There was always room for a congenial addition. Lona, rebuffed, knew now what Burris had sensed hours before. They were not wanted. He was the man of the evil eye, raining blight on their festivities. Clutching her brochures, Lona hurried back to the room. Burris was by the window, looking out over the snow.

  “Come go through these with me, Minner.” Her voice was pitched too high, too sharp.

  “Do any of them look interesting?”

  “They all do. I don’t really know what’s best. You do the picking.”

  They sat on the bed and sorted through the glossy sheaf. There was the Adélie Land tour, half a day, to see penguins. A full day tour to the Ross Shelf Ice, including a visit to Little America and to the other explorer bases at McMurdo Sound. Special stop to see the active volcano, Mount Erebus. Or a longer tour up to the Antarctic Peninsula to see seals and sea leopards. The skiing trip to Marie Byrd Land. The coastal mountain trip through Victoria Land to Mertz Glacial Tongue. And a dozen others. They picked the penguin tour, and when they went down for dinner later, they put their names on the list.

  At dinner they sat alone.

  Burris said, “Tell me about your children, Lona. Have you ever seen them?”

  “Not really. Not so I could touch, except only once. Just on screens.”

  “And Chalk will really get you some to raise?”

  “He said he would.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “What else can I do?” she asked. Her hand covered his. “Do your legs hurt you?”

  “Not really.”

  Neither of them ate much. After dinner films were shown: vivid tridims of an Antarctic winter. The darkness was the darkness of death, and a death-wind scoured across the plateau, lifting the top layer of snow like a million knives. Lona saw the penguins standing on their eggs, warming them. And then she saw ragged penguins driven before the gale, marching overland while a cosmic drum throbbed in the heavens and invisible hellhounds leaped on silent pads from peak to peak. The film ended with sunrise; the ice stained blood-red with the dawn of a six-month night; the frozen ocean breaking up, giant floes clashing and shattering. Most of the hotel guests went from the screening-room to the lounge. Lona and Burris went to bed. They did not make love. Lona sensed the storm building within him, and knew that it would burst forth before morning came.

  They lay cradled in darkness; the window had to be opaqued to shut out the tireless sun. Lona rested on her back beside him, breathing slowly, her flank touching his. Somehow she dozed, and a poor, shallow sleep came to her. Her own phantoms visited her after a while. She awoke, sweating, to find herself naked in a strange room with a strange man next to her. Her heart was fluttering. She pressed her hands to her breasts and remembered where she was.

  Burris stirred and groaned.

  Gusts of wind battered the building. This was summer, Lona reminded herself. The chill seeped to her bones. She heard a distant sound of laughter. But she did not leave his side, nor did she try to sleep again.

  Her eyes, dark-adjusted, watched his face. The mouth was expressive in its hinged way, sliding open, shutting, sliding again. Once his eyes did the same, but even when the lids were pulled back he saw nothing. He’s back on Manipool, Lona realized. They’ve just landed, he and…and the ones with Italian names. And in a little while the Things will come for him.

  Lona tried to see Manipool. The parched and reddened soil, the twisted, thorny plants. What were the cities like? Did they have roads, cars, vid-sets? Burris had never told her. All she knew was that it was a dry world, an old world, a world where the surgeons had great skill.

  And now Burris screamed.

  The sound began deep in his throat, a gargled, incoherent cry, and moved higher in pitch and volume as it progressed. Turning, Lona clung to him, pressing tight. Was his skin soaked with perspiration? No; impossible; it must be her own. He thrashed and kicked, sending the coverlet to the floor. She felt his muscles coiling and bulging beneath his sleek skin. He could snap me in half with a quick move, she thought.

  “It’s all right, Minner. I’m here. I’m here. It’s all right!”

  “The knives…Prolisse…good God, the knives!”

  “Minner!”

  She did not let go of him. His left arm was dangling limply now, seemingly bending the wrong way at the elbow. He was calming. His hoarse breath was as loud as hoofbeats. Lona reached across him and turned on the light.

  His face was blotched and mottled again. He blinked in that awful sidewise way of his three or four times and put his hand to his lips. Releasing him, she sat back, trembling a little. Tonight’s explosion had been more violent than the one the night before.

  “A drink of water?” she asked.

  He nodded. He was gripping the mattress so hard she thought he would tear it.

  He gulped. She said, “Was it that bad tonight? Were they hurting you?”

  “I dreamed I was watching them operate. First Prolisse, and he died. Then they carved up Malcondotto. He died. And then…”

  “Your turn?”

  “No,” he said in wonder. “No, they put Elise on the table. They carved her open, right between the—the breasts. And lifted up part of her chest, and I saw the ribs and her heart. And they reached inside.”

  “Poor Minner.” She had to interrupt him before he spilled all that filthiness over her. Why had he dreamed of Elise? Was it a good sign, that he should see her being mutilated? Or would it have been better, she thought, if I was the one he dreamed about…I, being turned into something like him?

  She took his hand and let it rest on the warmth of her body. There was only one method she could think of for easing his pain, and she employed it. He responded, rising, covering her. They moved urgently and harmoniously.

  He appeared to sleep after that. Lona, edgier, pulled away from him and waited until a light slumber once more enveloped her. It was stained by sour dreams. It seemed that a returning starman had brought a pestilent creature with him, some kind of plump vampire, and it was affixed to her body, draining her…depleting her. It was a nasty dream, though not nasty enough to awaken her, and in time she passed into a deeper repose.

  When they woke, there were dark circlets under her eyes, and her face looked pinched and hollow. Burris showed no effects of his broken night; his skin was not capable of reacting that graphically to short-range catabolic effects. He seemed almost cheerful as he got himself ready for the new day.

  “Looking forward to the penguins?” he asked her.

  Had he forgotten his bleak depression of the evening and his screaming terrors of the night? Or was he just trying to sweep them from view?

  Just how human is he, anyway, Lona wondered?

  “Yes,” she said coolly. “We’ll have a grand time, Minner. I can’t wait to see them.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

  ■

  ■ “They’re beginning to hate each other already,” Chalk said pleasantly.

  He was alone, but to him that was no reason for not voicing his thoughts. He often talked to himself. A doctor once had told him that there were positive neuropsychic benefits to be had from vocalizing, even in solitude.

  He floated in a bath of aromatic salts. The tub was ten feet deep, twenty feet long, a dozen feet wide: ample room even for the bulk of a Duncan Chalk. Its marble sides were flanked by alabaster rims and a surrounding tilework of shimmering oxblood porcelain, and the whole bathing enclosure was covered by a thick, clear dome that gave Chalk a full view of the sky. There was no reciprocal view of Chalk for an outsider; an ingenious optical engineer had seen to that. From without, the dome presented a milky surface-streaked with whorls of light pink.

  Chalk drifted idly, gravity-fre
e, thinking of his suffering amanti. Night had fallen but there were no stars tonight, only the reddish haze of unseen clouds. It was snowing once more. The flakes performed intricate arabesques as they spiraled toward the surface of the dome.

  “He is bored with her,” Chalk said. “She is afraid of him. She lacks intensity, to his taste. For hers, his voltage is too high. But they travel together. They eat together. They sleep together. And soon they’ll quarrel bitterly.”

  The tapes were very good. Aoudad, Nikolaides, both of them remaining surreptitiously close behind, picking up scattered gay images of the pair to relay to a waiting public. That snowball fight: a masterpiece. And the power-sled trip. Minner and Lona at the South Pole. The public was eating it up.

  Chalk, in his own way, ate it up, too.

  He closed his eyes and opaqued his dome and drifted easily in the warm, fragrant tub. To him came splintered, fragmented sensations of disquiet.

  …to have joints that did not behave as human joints should…

  …to feel despised, rejected of mankind…

  …childless motherhood…

  …bright flashes of pain, bright as the thermoluminescent fungi casting their yellow glow on his office walls…

  …the ache of the body and the ache of the soul…

  …alone!

  …unclean!

  Chalk gasped as though a low current were running through his body. A finger flew up at an angle to his hand and remained there a moment. A hound with slavering jaws bounded through his forebrain. Beneath the sagging flesh of his chest the thick bands of muscle rhythmically contracted and let go.

  …demon-visits in the sleep…

  …a forest of watching eyes, stalked and shining…

  …a world of dryness…thorns…thorns…

  …the click and scratch of strange beasts moving in the walls…dry rot of the soul…all poetry turned to ash, all love to rust…

  …stony eyes lifted toward the universe…and the universe peering back…

  In ecstasy Chalk kicked at the water, sending up spewing cascades. He slapped its surface with the flat of his hand. Flukes! There go flukes! Ahoy, ahoy!

  Pleasure engulfed and consumed him.

  And this, he told himself cozily some minutes later, was merely the beginning.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IN HEAVEN AS IT IS ON EARTH

  ■

  ■ On a day of flaming sunlight they left for Luna Tivoli, entering the next stage of their passage through Chalk’s aeries of delight. The day was bright, but it was still winter; they were fleeing from the true winter of the north and the wintry summer of the south to the weatherless winter of the void. At the spaceport they received the full celebrity treatment: newsreel shots in the terminal, then the snub-snouted little car rushing them across the field while the common folk looked on in wonder, vaguely cheering the notables, whoever they might be.

  Burris hated it. Every stray glance at him now seemed fresh surgery on his soul.

  “Why did you let yourself in for it, then?” Lona wanted to know. “If you don’t want people to see you like this, why did you ever let Chalk send you on this trip?”

  “As a penance. As a deliberately chosen atonement for my withdrawal from the world. For the sake of discipline.”

  The string of abstractions failed to convince her. Perhaps they made no impact at all.

  “But didn’t you have a reason?”

  “Those were my reasons.”

  “Just words.”

  “Never scoff at words, Lona.”

  Her nostrils flared momentarily. “You’re making fun of me again!”

  “Sorry.” Genuinely. It was so easy to mock her.

  She said, “I know what it’s like to be stared at. I’m shy about it. But I had to do this, so Chalk would give me some of my babies.”

  “He promised me something, too.”

  “There! I knew you’d admit it!”

  “A body transplant,” Burris confessed. “He’ll put me into a healthy, normal human body. All I have to do is let his cameras dissect me for a few months.”

  “Can they really do a thing like that?”

  “Lona, if they can make a hundred babies from a girl who’s never been touched by a man, they can do anything.”

  “But…to switch bodies…”

  Wearily he said, “They haven’t perfected the technique yet. It may be a few more years. I’ll have to wait.”

  “Oh, Minner, that would be wonderful! To put you in a real body!”

  “This is my real body.”

  “Another body. That isn’t so different. That doesn’t hurt you so much. If they only could!”

  “If they only could, yes.”

  She was more excited about it than he was. He had lived with the idea for weeks, long enough to doubt that it would ever be possible. And now he had dangled it before her, a gleaming new toy. But what did she care? They weren’t married. She’d get her babies from Chalk as her reward for this antic and would disappear into obscurity once more, fulfilled after her fashion, glad to be rid of that irritating, chafing, sarcastic consort. He’d go his own way, too, perhaps condemned to this grotesque housing forever, perhaps transferred to a sleek standard model body.

  The car scooted up a ramp, and they were within the ship. The vehicle’s top sprang back. Bart Aoudad peered in at them.

  “How are the lovebirds?”

  A silent exit, unsmiling. Aoudad, worried, fluttered about them. “Everybody cheerful, relaxed? No spacesickness, eh, Minner? Not you! Hah-hah-hah!”

  “Hah,” said Burris.

  Nikolaides, too, was there, with documents, booklets, expense vouchers. Dante had needed only Virgil to guide him through the circles of Hell, but I get two. We live in inflationary times. Burris gave Lona his arm, and they moved toward the innerness of the ship. Her fingers were rigid against his flesh. She was nervous about going to space, he thought, or else the unbroken tension of this grand tour was weighing too heavily on her.

  It was a brief trip: eight hours under low but steady acceleration to cover the 240,000 miles. This same ship had once made it in two stops, pausing first at the pleasure-satellite orbiting 50,000 miles from Earth. But the pleasure-satellite had exploded ten years ago, in one of the rare miscalculations of a secure epoch. Thousands of lives lost; debris raining down on Earth for a month; bare girders of the shattered globe orbiting like bones of a giant nearly three years before the salvage operation was complete.

  Someone Burris had loved had been aboard the Wheel when it died. She was there with someone else, though, savoring the game tables, the sensory shows, the haute cuisine, the atmosphere of never-come-tomorrow. Tomorrow had come unexpectedly.

  He had thought, when she broke with him, that nothing worse could happen to him in the rest of his days. A young man’s romantic fantasy, for very shortly she was dead, and that was far worse for him than when she had refused him. Dead, she was beyond hope of reclaiming, and for a while he was dead, too, though still walking about. And after that, curiously, the pain ebbed until it was all gone. The worst possible thing, to lose a girl to a rival, then to lose her to catastrophe? Hardly. Hardly. Ten years later Burris had lost himself. Now he thought he knew what the real worst might be.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Aristarchus IV. On behalf of Captain Villeparisis, I want to offer our best wishes for a pleasant trip. We must ask you to remain in your cradles until the period of maximum acceleration is over. Once we’ve escaped from Earth, you’ll be free to stretch your legs a bit and enjoy a view of space.”

  The ship held four hundred passengers, freight, mail. There were twenty private cabins along its haunches, and one had been assigned to Burris and Lona. The others sat side by side in a vast congregation, wriggling for a view of the nearest port.

  “Here we go,” Burris said softly.

  He felt the jets flail and kick at the earth, felt the rockets cut in, felt the ship lift effortlessly. A triple bank of gravitrons shiel
ded the passengers from the worst effects of the blast-off, but it was impossible to delete gravity altogether on so huge a vessel, as Chalk had been able to do on his little pleasure-craft.

  The shrinking Earth dangled like a green plum just outside the viewport. Burris realized that Lona was not looking at it, but solicitously was studying him.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Fine. Fine.”

  “You don’t look relaxed.”

  “It’s the gravity drag. Do you think I’m nervous about going into space?”

  A shrug. “It’s your first time up since—since Manipool, isn’t it?”

  “I took that ride in Chalk’s ship, remember?”

  “That was different. That was sub-atmospheric.”

  “You think I’m going to congeal in terror just because I’m taking a space journey?” he asked. “Do you suppose that I imagine this ferry is a nonstop express back to Manipool?”

  “You’re twisting my words.”

  “Am I, now? I said I felt fine. And you began to construct a great elaborate fantasy of malaise for me. You—”

  “Stop it, Minner.”

  Her eyes were bleak. Her words were sharply accented, brittle, keen-edged. He forced his shoulders back against the cradle and tried to compel his hand-tentacles to uncoil. Now she had done it: he had been relaxed, but she had made him tense. Why did she have to mother him this way? He was no cripple. He didn’t need to be calmed in a blast-off. He had been blasting off years before she was born. Then what frightened him now? How could her words have undermined his confidence so easily?

  They halted the quarrel as though slicing a tape, but ragged edges remained. He said, as gently as he could, “Don’t miss the view, Lona. You’ve never seen Earth from up here before, have you?”

  The planet was far from them now. Its complete outline could be discerned. The Western Hemisphere faced them in a blaze of sunlight. Of Antarctica, whore they had been only hours ago, nothing was visible except the long jutting finger of the Peninsula, thumbing itself at Cape Horn.

  With an effort not to sound didactic, Burris showed her how the sunlight struck the planet athwart, warming the south at this time of year, barely brightening the north. He spoke of the ecliptic and its plane, of the rotation and the revolution of the planet, of the procession of the seasons. Lona listened gravely, nodding often, making polite sounds of agreement whenever he paused to await them. He suspected that she still did not understand. But at this point he was willing to settle for the shadow of comprehension, if he could not have the substance, and she gave him the shadow.