Thorns Read online

  He was not a man normally vulnerable to terror. But this had been too much: the great greasy shapes moving about his ship, the golden manacles, the case of surgical instruments open and ready.

  “——,” the pockmarked monster to his left had said.

  “— —— ———,” the creature on the other side had replied in what sounded like unctuous terms.

  Then they had begun the work of destroying Minner Burris.

  Then was then and now was now, but Burris carried about a load of pain and strangeness that eternally reminded him, waking or sleeping, of the thing that had been done to him behind the cloak of darkness, beyond the unspinning chill of Pluto.

  He had returned to Earth three weeks ago. He lived now in a single room of the Martlet Towers, supported by a government pension and propped somehow by his own inner resilience. To be transformed by monsters into a monster was no easy fate to accept, but Burris was doing his best.

  If only there were not so much pain—

  The doctors who had examined him had been confident at first that they could do something about the pain. All it took was the application of modern medical technology.

  “—damp down the sensory intake—”

  “—minimal dosage of drugs to block the afferent channels, and then—”

  “—minor corrective surgery—”

  But the lines of communication within Burris’s body were hopelessly scrambled. Whatever the alien surgeons had done to him, they had certainly transformed him into something that was beyond the comprehension, let alone the capabilities, of modern medical technology. Ordinary pain-killing drugs merely intensified Burris’ sensations. His patterns of neural flow were bizarre; sensation was shunted, baffled, deflected. They could not repair the damage the aliens had done. And finally Burris crept away from them, throbbing, mutilated, aggrieved, to hide himself in a dark room of this moldering residential colossus.

  Seventy years before, the Martlet Towers had been the last word in dwelling-places: sleek mile-high edifices arrayed in serried ranks along the formerly green slopes of the Adirondacks, within easy commuting distance of New York. Seventy years is a long time in the lifetime of contemporary buildings. Now the Towers were corroded, pitted by time, transfixed by the arrows of decay. Suites of earlier resplendence were subdivided into single-room warrens. An ideal place to hide, Burris thought. One nestled into one’s cell here like a polyp within its limestone cave. One rested; one thought; one worked at the strenuous task of coming to terms with what had been committed upon one’s helpless form.

  Burris heard scrabbling sounds in the corridors. He did not investigate. Whelks and prawns, mysteriously mutated for land life, infiltrating the crawl spaces of the building? Millipedes seeking the sweet warmth of leaf mold? Toys of the dull-eyed children? Burris stayed in the room. He often thought of going out at night, prowling the passages of the building like his own ghost, striding through darkness to strike terror into chance beholders. But he had not left the four walls since the day he had rented—by proxy—this zone of calm in tempest.

  He lay in bed. Pale green light filtered through the walls. The mirror could not be removed, for it was part of the structure of the building, but it could at least be neutralized; Burris had switched it off, and it was nothing now but a dull brown oblong on the wall. From time to time he activated it and confronted himself, as discipline. Perhaps, he thought, he would do that today.

  When I rise from bed.

  If I rise from bed.

  Why should I rise from bed?

  There was an inner spike embedded in his brain, clamps gripping his viscera, invisible nails riveting his ankles. His eyelids sandpapered his eyes. Pain was a constant, even growing now to become an old friend.

  What was it the poet said? The withness of the body…

  Burris opened his eyes. They no longer opened up and down, as human eyes did. Now the membranes that served as lids slid outward from the center toward the comers. Why? Why had the alien surgeons done any of it? But this in particular seemed to serve no valid purpose. Top-and-bottom eyelids were good enough. These did not improve the function of the eyes; they served only to act as intrusive wardens against any sort of meaningful communication between Burris and the human race. At each blink he shouted his weirdness.

  The eyes moved. A human eye moves in a series of tiny jerking motions, which the mind melds together into an abstraction of unity. Burris’s eyes moved as the panning eye of a camera would move if cameras were perfectly mounted: smoothly, continuously, unflickeringly. What Burris saw lacked glamour. Walls, low ceiling, neutralized mirror, vibrator sink, food conduit hatch, all the drab appurtenances of a simple low-cost room designed for self-sufficiency. The window had been kept opaqued since he had moved in. He had no idea of time of day, of weather, even of season, though it had been winter when he came here and he suspected that it was winter still. The lighting in the room was poor. Squibs of indirect illumination emerged on a random pattern. This was Burris’s period of low receptivity to light. For days at a time the world at its brightest seemed a murky darkness to him, as though he were at the bottom of a muddy pond. Then the cycle would reverse itself with an unpredictable flip, and a few photons would be sufficient to light up his brain in a wild blaze.

  Out of the murk came the image of his vanished self. The obliterated Minner Burris stood in a blunted corner of the room, studying him.

  Dialogue of self and soul.

  “You’re back, you filthy hallucination!”

  “I won’t ever leave you.”

  “All I have, is that it? Well, make yourself welcome. A bit of cognac? Accept my humble hospitality. Sit down, sit down!”

  “I’ll stand. How are you coming along, Minner?”

  “Poorly. A lot you care.”

  “Is that a note of self-pity I detect in your voice?”

  “What if it is? What if it is?”

  “A terrible voice, and one that I never taught you.”

  Burris could not sweat any longer, but a cloud of vapor gathered over each of his new exhalator pores. He stared fixedly at his former self. In a low voice he said, “Do you know what I wish? That they’d get hold of you and do to you what they did to me. Then you’d understand.”

  “Minner, Minner, it’s already been done to me! Ecce homo! There you lie to prove that I’ve been through it!”

  “No. There you stand to prove that you haven’t. Your face. Your pancreas. Your liver and lights. Your skin. It hurts, it hurts—it hurts me, not you!”

  The apparition smiled gently. “When did you begin feeling so sorry for yourself? This is a new development, Minner.”

  Burris scowled. “Perhaps you’re right.” The eyes smoothly scanned the room from wall to wall again. He muttered, “They’re watching me, that’s the trouble.”

  “Who is?”

  “How would I know? Eyes. Telelenses in the walls. I’ve searched for them, but it’s no use. Two molecules in diameter—how am I ever going to find them? And they see me.”

  “Let them look, then. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You’re neither pretty nor ugly. There’s no point of reference for you. I think it’s time you went outside again.”

  “It’s easy for you to say that,” Burris snapped. “No one stares at you.”

  “You’re staring at me right now.”

  “So I am,” Burris admitted. “But you know why.”

  With a conscious effort he induced the phase-shift to begin. His eyes dealt with the light in the room. He no longer had retinas, but the focus-plates embedded against his brain served well enough. He looked at his former self.

  A tall man, broad-shouldered and blocky, with heavy muscles and thick sandy hair. So he had been. So he was now. The alien surgeons had left the underlying structure intact. But all else was different.

  The vision of self before him had a face nearly as wide as it was high, with generous cheekbones, small ears, and dark eyes set far apart. The lips were the sort that compr
ess themselves easily into a rather fussy line. A light powdering of freckles covered the skin; there was fine golden hair almost everywhere on him. The effect was routinely virile: a man of some strength, some intelligence, some skill, who would stand out in a group not by virtue of any conspicuous positive trait but by grace of a whole constellation of inconspicuous positive traits. Success with women, success with other men, success in his profession—all those things accompanied such triumphant unspectacular attractiveness.

  All that was gone now.

  Burris said quietly, “I don’t mean to sound Self-pitying now. Kick me if I whine. But do you remember when we would see hunchbacks? A man with no nose? A girl folded into herself with no neck and half an arm? Freaks? Victims? And we’d wonder what it was like to be hideous.”

  “You’re not hideous, Minner. Just different.”

  “Choke on your stinking semantics! I’m something that everyone would stare at now. I’m a monster. Suddenly I’m out of your world and into the world of the hunchbacks. They know damned well that they can’t escape all those eyes. They cease to have independent existences and blur into the fact of their own deformities.”

  “You’re projecting, Minner. How can you know?”

  “Because it’s happening to me. My whole life now is built around what the Things did to me. I don’t have any other existence. It’s the central fact, the only fact. How can we know the dancer from the dance? I can’t. If I ever went outside, I’d be on constant display.”

  “A hunchback has a lifetime to get used to himself. He forgets his back. You’re still new at this. Be patient, Minner. You’ll come to terms. You’ll forgive the staring eyes.”

  “How soon? How soon?”

  But the apparition was gone. Prodding himself through several shifts of vision, Burris searched the room and found himself again alone. He sat up, feeling the needles pricking his nerves. There was no motion without its cluster of discomforts. His body was ever with him.

  He stood up, rising in a single fluid motion. This new body gives me pain, he told himself, but it is efficient. I must come to love it.

  He braced himself in the middle of the floor.

  Self-pity is fatal, Burris thought. I must not wallow. I must come to terms. I must adjust.

  I must go out into the world.

  I was a strong man, not just physically. Is all my strength—that strength—gone now?

  Within him coiling tubes meshed and unmeshed. Tiny stopcocks released mysterious hormones. The chambers of his heart performed an intricate dance.

  They’re watching me, Burris thought. Let them watch! Let them get a good eyeful!

  With a savage swipe of his hand he switched on the mirror and beheld his naked self.

  THREE

  SUBTERRANEAN RUMBLES

  ■

  ■ Aoudad said, “What if we traded? You monitor Burris, I’ll watch the girl. Eh?”

  “Nix.” Nikolaides drew the final consonant out luxuriously. “Chalk gave her to me, him to you. She’s a bore, anyway. Why switch?”

  “I’m tired of him.”

  “Put up with him,” Nikolaides advised. “Unpleasantness is upbuilding to character.”

  “You’ve been listening to Chalk too long.”

  “Haven’t we all?”

  They smiled. There would be no trade of responsibilities. Aoudad jabbed at the switch, and the car in which they were riding cut sharply from one mastercom network to the other. It began rocketing northward at a hundred and fifty miles an hour.

  Aoudad had designed the car himself, for Chalk’s own use. It was a womb, more or less, lined with soft warm pink spongy fibers and equipped with every sort of comfort short of gravitrons. Chalk had wearied of it lately and was willing to let underlings make use of it. Aoudad and Nikolaides rode it often. Each man considered himself Chalk’s closest associate; each quietly considered the other a flunky. It was a useful mutual delusion.

  The trick was to establish some sort of existence for yourself independent of Duncan Chalk. Chalk demanded most of your waking hours and was not above using you in your sleep when he could. Yet there was always some fragment of your life in which you stood apart from the fat man and regarded yourself as a rounded, self-guiding human being. For Nikolaides the answer lay in physical exertion: skimming lakes, hiking to the rim of a boiling sulfurous volcano, sky-paddling, desert-drilling. Aoudad had chosen exertion, too, but of a softer kind; legs spread and toe touching toe, his women would form a trestle stretching across several continents. D’Amore and the others had their own individual escapes. Chalk devoured those who did not.

  Snow was falling again. The delicate flakes perished almost as soon as they landed, but the car-track was slippery. Servo-mechanisms quickly adjusted the tracking equipment to keep the car upright. Its occupants reacted in different ways; Nikolaides quickened at the thought of the potential danger, minute though it was, while Aoudad thought gloomily of the eager thighs that awaited him if he survived the journey.

  Nikolaides said, “About this trade—”

  “Forget it. If the answer’s no, the answer’s no.”

  “I just want to find out. Tell me this, Bart: are you interested in the girl’s body?”

  Aoudad recoiled in excessive innocence. “What the hell do you think I am?”

  “I know what you are, and so does everyone else. But I’m just fishing around. Do you have some odd idea that if we switch assignments and you get Lona, you’ll be able to have her?”

  Sputtering, Aoudad said, “I draw the line at some women. I’d never meddle with her. For Christ’s sake, Nick! The girl is too dangerous. A seventeen-year-old virgin with a hundred kids—I wouldn’t touch her! Did you really think I would?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why’d you ask, then?”

  Nikolaides shrugged and stared at the snow.

  Aoudad said, “Chalk asked you to find out, is that it? He’s afraid I’ll molest her, is that it? Is it? Is it?” Nikolaides did not answer, and suddenly Aoudad began to tremble. If Chalk could suspect him of such desires, Chalk must have lost all faith in him. The compartments were separate: work here, women there. Aoudad had never straddled those compartments yet, and Chalk knew it. What was wrong? Where had he failed the fat man? Why had faith been withdrawn this way?

  Aoudad said hollowly, “Nick, I swear to you I had no such intentions in proposing a switch. The girl doesn’t interest me sexually at all. Not at all. You think I want a goddam grotesque kid like that? All I had in mind was I was tired of looking at Burris’s mixed-up body. I wanted variety in my assignment. And you—”

  “Cut it out, Bart.”

  “—read all sorts of sinister and perverse—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Chalk did, then. And you went along with him. Is this a plot? Who’s out to get me?”

  Nikolaides nudged his left thumb into the dispenser button, and a tray of relaxers popped out. Quietly he handed one to Aoudad, who took the slender ivory-colored tube and pressed it to his forearm. An instant later the tension ebbed. Aoudad tugged at the pointed tip of his left ear. That had been a bad one, that surge of tension and suspicion. They were coming more frequently now. He feared that something nasty was happening to him and that Duncan Chalk was tapping in on his emotions, drinking in the sensations as he passed on a predestined course through paranoia and schizophrenia to catatonic suspension.

  I will not let it happen to me, Aoudad resolved. He can have his pleasures, but he won’t get his fangs into my throat.

  “We’ll remain on our assignments until Chalk says otherwise, yes?” he said aloud.

  “Yes,” Nikolaides replied.

  “Shall we monitor them as we ride along?”

  “No objections.”

  The car was passing the Appalachia Tunnel now. High blank walls hemmed them in. The highway was steeply banked here, and as the car barreled along at a high-G acceleration, a gleam of sensual appreciation came into Nikolaides’s eyes. He sat bac
k in the huge seat meant for Chalk. Aoudad, beside him, opened the communication channels. The screens lit.

  “Yours,” he said. “Mine.”

  He looked at his. Aoudad no longer shivered when he saw Minner Burris, but the sight was a spooky one even now. Burris stood before his mirror, thereby providing Aoudad with the sight of two of him.

  “There but for the grace of something-or-other go we,” Aoudad murmured. “How’d you like to have that done to you?”

  “I’d kill myself instantly,” said Nikolaides. “But somehow I think the girl’s in a worse mess. Can you see her from where you’re sitting?”

  “What is she doing? She’s naked?”

  “Bathing,” said Nikolaides. “A hundred children! Never been had by a man! The things we take for granted, Bart. Look.”

  Aoudad looked. The squat bright screen showed him a nude girl standing under a vibraspray. He hoped that Chalk was fastened to his emotional stream right now, for as he looked at Lona Kelvin’s bare body he felt nothing. Not a thing. No shred of sensuality.

  She could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Her shoulders sloped, her face was wan, her eyes lacked sparkle. She had small breasts, a slender waist, narrow boyish hips. As Aoudad watched, she turned around, showing him flat, scarcely feminine buttocks, and switched off the vibraspray. She began to dress. Her motions were slow, her expression sullen.

  “Maybe I’m prejudiced because I’ve been working with Burris,” Aoudad said, “but it seems to me that he’s very much more complicated than she is. She’s just a dumb kid who’s had a hard time. What will he see in her?”

  “He’ll see a human being,” said Nikolaides. “That may be enough. Perhaps. Perhaps. It’s worth a try, bringing them together.”

  “You sound like a humanitarian,” Aoudad said in wonder.