Thorns Read online

  Dots of color blazed in the sunken cheeks. “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, I’m not really important. Let’s talk about space, Colonel Burris!”

  “Not Colonel. Minner.”

  “Out there—”

  “Are Things that catch you and change you all around. That’s what space is, Lona.”

  “How terrible!”

  “I think so, too. But don’t reinforce my convictions.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I feel terribly sorry for myself,” Burris said. “If you give me half a chance, I’ll pour your shell-like ear full of bad news. I’ll tell you just how unfair I think it was for them to have done this to me. I’ll gabble about the injustice of the blind universe. I’ll talk a lot of foolishness.”

  “But you’ve got a right to be angry about it! You didn’t mean any harm to them. They just took you and—”

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t decent of them!”

  “I know, Lona. But I’ve already said that at great length, mostly to myself but also to anyone who’d listen. It’s practically the only thing I say or think. And so I’ve undergone a second transformation. From man to monster; from monster to walking embodiment of injustice.”

  She looked puzzled. I’m talking over her head, he told himself.

  He said, “What I mean is, I’ve let this thing that happened to me become me. I’m a thing, a commodity, a moral event. Other men have ambitions, desires, accomplishments, attainments, I’ve got my mutilation, and it’s devouring me. Has devoured me. So I try to escape from it.”

  “You’re saying that you’d rather not talk about what happened to you?” Lona asked.

  “Something like that.”

  She nodded. He saw her nostrils flicker, saw her thin lips curl in animation. A smile burst forth. “You know, Col—Minner—it’s a little bit the same way with me. I mean, being a victim and all, and feeling so sorry for yourself. They did something bad to me, too, and since then all I do is go back and think about it and get angry. Or sick. And the thing I really should be doing is forgetting about it and going on to something else.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I can’t. Instead I keep trying to kill myself because I decide I can’t bear it.” Her eyes faltered to the floor. “Do you mind if I ask—have you—have you ever tried—”

  A halt.

  “To kill myself since this happened? No. No, Lona. I just brood. Slow suicide, it’s called.”

  “We ought to make a deal,” she said. “Instead of me feeling sorry for me, and you for you, let me feel sorry for you, and you feel sorry for me. And we’ll tell each other how terrible the world has been to the other one. But not to ourselves. I’m getting the words all mixed up, but do you know what I mean?”

  “A mutual sympathy society. Victims of the universe, unite!” He laughed. “Yes, I understand. Good idea, Lona! It’s just what I—what we need. I mean, just what you need.”

  “And what you need.”

  She looked pleased with herself. She was smiling from forehead to chin, and Burris was surprised at the change that came over her appearance when that glow of self-satisfaction appeared. She seemed to grow a year or two older, to pick up strength and poise. And even womanliness. For an instant she was no longer skinny and pathetic. But then the glow faded and she was a little girl again.

  “Do you like to play card games?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you play Ten Planets?”

  “If you’ll teach me,” Burris said.

  “I’ll go get the cards.”

  She bounced out of the room, her robe fluttering around her slim figure. Returning a moment later with a deck of waxy-looking cards, she joined him on the bed. Burris’s quick eyes were on her when the middle snap of her pajama top lost polarity, and he caught a glimpse of a small, taut white breast within. She brushed her hand over the snap an instant later. She was not quite a woman, Burris told himself, but not a child, either. And then he reminded himself: this slender girl is the mother (?) of a hundred babies.

  “Have you ever played the game?” she asked.

  “Afraid not.”

  “It’s quite simple. First I deal ten cards apiece—”

  SIXTEEN

  THE OWL, FOR ALL HIS FEATHERS, WAS A-COLD

  ■

  ■ They stood together by the hospital power plant, looking through the transparent wall. Within, something fibrous lashed and churned as it picked up energy from the nearest pylon and fed it to the transformer bank. Burris was explaining to her about how power was transmitted that way, without wires. Lona tried to listen, but she did not really care enough about finding out. It was hard to concentrate on something like that, so remote from her experience. Especially with him beside her.

  “Quite a contrast from the old days,” he was saying. “I can still recall a time when the million-kv lines were strung across the countryside, and they were talking of stepping the voltage up to a million and a half—”

  “You know so many things. How did you have time to learn all that about electricity if you had to be a starman, too?”

  “I’m terribly old,” he said.

  “I bet you aren’t even eighty yet.”

  She was joking, but he didn’t seem to realize it. His face quirked in that funny way, the lips (were they still to be called lips?) pulling outward toward his cheeks. “I’m forty years old,” he said hollowly. “I suppose to you forty is most of the way to being eighty.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Let’s go look at the garden.”

  “All those sharp pointed things!”

  “You don’t like them,” he said.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Lona insisted, recovering quickly. He likes the cacti, she told herself. I mustn’t criticize the things he likes. He needs someone to like the things he likes. Even if they aren’t very pretty.

  They strolled toward the garden. It was noon, and the pale sun cut sharp shadows into the crisp, dry earth. Lona shivered. She had a coat on over her hospital gown, but even so, even here in the desert, it was a cold day. Burris, lightly dressed, didn’t seem to mind the chill. Lona wondered whether that new body of his had some way of adjusting to meet the temperature, like a snake’s. But she didn’t ask. She tried not to talk to him about his body. And the more she thought about it, the more it seemed to her that a snake’s way of adjusting to cold weather was to crawl off and go to sleep. She let the point pass.

  He told her a great deal about cacti.

  They paced the garden, up and down, through the avenues of bristling plants. Not a leaf, not even a bough. Nor a flower. Here are buds, though, he told her. This one will have a fine red apple-like fruit in June. They make candy from this one. Thorns and all? Oh, no, not the thorns. He laughed. She laughed, too. She wanted to reach out and take him by the hand. What would it be like, feeling that curling extra thing against her fingers?

  She had expected to be afraid of him. It surprised her, but she felt no fear.

  She wished he would take her inside, though.

  He pointed to a blurred shape hovering over one of the nastiest-looking of the cactus plants. “Look there!”

  “A big moth?”

  “Hummingbird, silly! He must be lost.” Burris moved forward, obviously excited. Lona saw the things on his hands wriggle around, as they often did when he wasn’t paying attention to them. He was down on one knee, peering at the hummingbird. She looked at him in profile, observing the strong jaw, the flat drumhead of twanging skin where an ear should have been. Then, because he would want her to, she looked at the bird. She saw a tiny body and what could perhaps be a long, straight bill. A dark cloud hung about the bird. “Are those its wings?” she asked.

  “Yes. Beating terribly fast. You can’t see them, can you?”

  “Just a blur.”

  “I see the individual wings. Lona, it’s incredible! I see the wings! With these eyes!”

  “That’s wonderful, Minner.”

  “T
he bird’s a stray; probably belongs in Mexico, probably wishes he were there now. He’ll die up here before he finds a flower. I wish I could do something.”

  “Catch him? Have someone take him to Mexico?”

  Burris looked at his hands as if weighing the possibility of seizing the hummingbird in a lightning swoop. Then he shook his head. “My hands couldn’t be fast enough, even now. Or I’d crush him if I caught him. I—there he goes!”

  And there he went. Lona watched the brown blur vanish down the garden. At least he’s going south, she thought. She turned to Burris.

  “It pleases you some of the time, doesn’t it?” she asked. “You like it…a little.”

  “Like what?”

  “Your new body.”

  He quivered a little. She wished she hadn’t mentioned it.

  He seemed to check a first rush of words. He said, “It has a few advantages, I admit.”

  “Minner, I’m cold.”

  “Shall we go inside?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Anything you say, Lona.”

  They moved side by side toward the door. Their shadows dribbled off to their left at a sharp angle. He was much taller than she was, nearly a foot. And very strong. I wish. That he would take me. In his arms.

  She was not at all put off by his appearance.

  Of course, she had seen only his head and his hands. He might have a huge staring eye set in the middle of his chest. Or a mouth under each arm. A tail. Big purple spots. But as the fantasies welled through her mind, it struck her that even those inventions were not really frightening. If she could get used to his face and his hands, as she had so speedily, what would further differences matter? He had no ears, his nose was not a nose, his eyes and his lips were strange, his tongue and his teeth were like something out of a dream. And each hand had that extra thing. Yet quite rapidly she had stopped noticing. His voice was pleasant and normal, and he was so smart, so interesting. And he seemed to like her. Was he married, she wondered. How could she ask?

  The hospital door bellied inward as they approached.

  “My room?” he asked. “Or yours?”

  “What will we do now?”

  “Sit. Talk. Play cards.”

  “Playing cards bored you.”

  “Did I ever say it did?” he asked her.

  “You were too polite. But I could tell. I could see you were hiding it. It was written all over your…” Her voice trailed off. “Face.”

  It keeps coming back, she thought.

  “Here’s my room,” she said.

  Which room they went to hardly mattered. They were identical, one facing the rear garden where they had just been, one facing the courtyard. A bed, a desk, an array of medical equipment. He took the bedside chair. She sat on the bed. She wanted him to come over and touch her body, warm her chilled flesh, but of course she did not dare suggest it.

  “Minner, how soon will you be leaving the hospital?”

  “Soon. A few days. What about you, Lona?”

  “I guess I could go out almost any time now. What will you do when you leave?”

  “I’m not sure. I think I’ll travel. See the world, let the world see me.”

  “I’ve always wanted to travel,” she said. Too obvious. “I’ve never really been anywhere.”

  “Such as where?”

  “Luna Tivoli,” she said. “Or the Crystal Planet. Or—well, anywhere. China. The Antarctic.”

  “It’s not hard to get there. You get on the liner and go,” For an instant his face sealed itself, and she did not know what to think; the lips slid shut, the eyes clicked their lids into place. She thought of a turtle. Then Burris opened again and said, astonishing her, “What if we went to some of those places together?”

  SEVENTEEN

  TAKE UP THESE SPLINTERS

  ■

  ■ Somewhat higher than the atmosphere Chalk soared. He looked upon his world and found it good. The seas were green verging on blue, or blue verging on green, and it seemed to him that he could discern icebergs adrift. The land was brown in winter’s grip, to the north; summer-green lay below the curving middle.

  He spent much of his time in lower space. It was the best way, the most esthetically satisfying way, of shunning gravity. Perhaps his pilot felt distress, for Chalk did not permit the use of reverse gravitrons up here, nor even any centrifuging to provide the illusion of weight. But his pilot was paid well enough to endure such discomforts, if discomforts they were.

  For Chalk it was not remotely a discomfort to be weightless. He had his mass, his wonderful brontosaurian mass, and yet he had none of the drawbacks thereof.

  “This is one of the few instances,” he said to Burris and the girl, “where one can legitimately get something for nothing. Consider: when we blast off, we dissipate the gravity of acceleration through gravitrons, so that the extra Gs are squirted away and we rise in comfort. There’s no effort for us in getting where we are, no price to pay in extra weight before we can be weightless. When we land, we treat the deceleration problem the same way. Normal weight, weightless, normal again, and no flattening at any time.”

  “But is it free?” Lona asked. “I mean, it must cost a lot to run the gravitrons. When you balance everything out, the expense of starting and stopping, you haven’t really had anything for nothing, have you?”

  Chalk, amused, looked at Burris. “She’s very clever, did you realize that?”

  “So I’ve been noticing.”

  Lona reddened. “You’re making fun of me.”

  “No, we aren’t,” said Burris. “You’ve hit quite independently on the notion of conservation of gravity, don’t you see? But you’re being too strict with our host. He’s looking at things from his point of view. If he doesn’t have to feel the buildup of Gs himself, it doesn’t cost him anything in the realest sense of the word. Not in terms of enduring high G. The gravitrons absorb all that. Look, it’s like committing a crime, Lona, and paying someone else to go through rehabilitation. Sure, it costs you cash to find a rehab substitute. But you’ve had your crime, and he takes the punishment. The cash equivalent—”

  “Let it go,” Lona said. “It’s nice up here, anyway.”

  “You like weightlessness?” Chalk asked. “Have you ever experienced it before?”

  “Not really. A few short trips.”

  “And you, Burris? Does the lack of gravity help your discomforts any?”

  “A little, thanks. There’s no drag on the organs that aren’t where they really ought to be. I don’t feel that damned pulling in my chest. A small mercy, but I’m grateful.”

  Nevertheless, Burris was still in his bath of pain, Chalk noticed. Perhaps more tepid, but not enough. What was it like to feel constant physical discomfort? Chalk knew a little of that, simply through the effort of hauling his body around in full gravity. But he had been bloated so long. He was accustomed to the steady aching pull. Burris, though? The sensations of nails being hammered into his flesh? He did not protest. Only now and then did the bitter rebellion surge to the surface. Burris was improving, learning to accommodate to what was for him the human condition. Chalk, sensitive as he was, still picked up the emanations of pain. Not merely psychic pain. Physical pain, too. Burris had grown calmer, had risen from the black pit of depression in which Aoudad had first encountered him, but he was far from any beds of roses.

  The girl, comparatively, was in better shape, Chalk concluded. She was not quite so intricate a mechanism.

  They looked happy side by side, Burris and the girl.

  That would change, of course, as time went on.

  “You see Hawaii?” Chalk asked. “And there, by the edge of the world: China. The Great Wall. We’ve had it restored, a good deal of it. See, running inland from the sea just above that gulf. Passing north of Peking, up into those mountains. The middle section is gone, the Ordos desert stretch. But then it was never very much, just a line of mud. And beyond, toward Sinkiang, see it coming up now? We have se
veral party centers along the Wall. A new one opening just on the Mongolian side shortly. Kublai Khan’s Pleasure Dome.” Chalk laughed. “But not stately. Anything but stately.”

  They were holding hands, Chalk observed.

  He concentrated on picking up their emotions. Nothing useful yet. From the girl came a kind of mild, squashy contentment, a blank maternal sort of thing. Yes, she would. And from Burris? Not much of anything, so far. He was relaxed, more relaxed than Chalk had yet seen him to be. Burris liked the girl. She amused him, obviously. He enjoyed the attention she gave him. But he did not have any strong feeling toward her; he did not really think very much of her as a person. Soon she would be powerfully in love with him. Chalk thought it unlikely that the emotion would be reciprocated. Out of that difference in voltages an interesting current might be generated, Chalk surmised. A thermocouple effect, so to speak. We will see.

  The ship hurtled westward over China, past the Kansu Panhandle, orbiting over the Old Silk Road.

  Chalk said, “I understand that you two will be leaving on your travels tomorrow. So Nick tells me.”

  “That’s right. The itinerary’s arranged,” said Burris.

  “I can’t wait. I’m so awfully excited!” Lona cried.

  The schoolgirl blurt of words annoyed Burris. Chalk, well attuned to their shifting moods now, dug his receptors into the flash of irritation that rolled from him and gobbled it down. The burst of emotion was a sudden rent in a seamless velvet veil. A jagged dark streak across pearly gray smoothness. A beginning, Chalk thought. A beginning.

  “It should be quite a trip,” he said. “Billions of people wish you well.”

  EIGHTEEN

  TO THE TOY FAIR

  ■

  ■ You covered ground swiftly when you were in the hands of Duncan Chalk. Chalk’s minions had conveyed them nonstop from the hospital to Chalk’s private spaceport; then, after their flight around the world, they had been sped to the hotel. It was the most magnificent hotel the Western Hemisphere had ever known, a fact that seemed to dazzle Lona and that obscurely bothered Burris.