Robert Silverberg - Thorns

Centuplets. A hundred siblings sharing the same group of codons. What would they be like? How would they grow? Could a man live in a world shared by fifty brothers and fifty sisters? That was part of the experiment. This experiment was to be a lifetime long. The psychologists had moved in. Much was known of quintuplets: sextuplets had been studied somewhat, and there had briefly been a set of septuplets thirty years before. But centuplets? An infinity of new research!

Without Lona. Her part had ended on the first day. Something cool and tingly swabbed across her thighs by a smiling nurse. Then men, staring without interest at her body. A drug. A dreamy haze through which she was aware of penetration. No other sensation. The end. “Thank you, Miss Kelvin. Your fee.” Cool linens against her body. Elsewhere they were beginning to do things to the borrowed ova.

My babies. My babies.

Lights in my eyes!

When the time came to kill herself, Lona did not quite succeed at it. Doctors who could give life to a speck of matter could also sustain life in the source of that speck. They put her back together, and then they forgot about her.

A nine days’ wonder is granted obscurity on the tenth day.

Obscurity, but not peace. Peace was never granted; it had to be won, the hard way, from within. Living again in darkness, Lona yet could never be the same, for somewhere else a hundred babies thrived and fattened. They had reached not only into her ovaries but into the fabric of her life itself to draw forth those babies, and she reverberated still with the recoil.

She shivered in the darkness.

Someday soon, she promised herself, I’ll try again. And this time no one will notice me. This time they’ll let me go. I’ll sleep a long time.

For Burris it was something like being born. He had not left his room in so many weeks that it had come to seem a permanent shelter.

Aoudad thoughtfully made the delivery as painless as possible for him, though. They left at dead of night, when the city slept. Burris was cloaked and hooded. It gave him such a conspiratorial look that he was forced to smile at the effect; yet he regarded it as necessary. The hood hid him well, and so long as he kept his head down, he was safe from the glances of the casual. As they left the building, Burris remained in the far corner of the dropshaft, praying that no one else would summon it as he descended. No one did. But on the way through the entrance, a drifting blob of glowing light illuminated him for a moment just when a homecoming resident appeared. The man paused, staring beneath the hood. Burris remained expressionless. The man blinked, seeing the unexpected. Burris’s harsh, distorted face regarded him coldly, and the man moved on. His sleep would be tinctured with nightmare that night. But that was better, thought Burris, than having the nightmare steal into the texture of your life itself, as had happened to him.

A car waited just beyond the lip of the building.

“Chalk doesn’t ordinarily hold interviews at this hour,” Aoudad chattered. “But you must understand that this is something special, He means to give you every consideration.”

“Splendid,” Burris said darkly.

They entered the car. It was like exchanging one womb for another less spacious but more inviting. Burris settled against a couch-seat big enough for several people, but evidently modeled to fit a single pair of enormous buttocks. Aoudad sat beside him in a more normal accommodation. The car started, gliding quietly away in a thrum of turbines. Its transponders picked up the emanations of the nearest highway, and shortly they left city streets behind and were hurtling along a restricted-access route.

The windows of the car were comfortingly opaque. Burris threw back the hood. He was accustoming himself in short stages to showing himself to other people. Aoudad, who did not appear to mind his mutilations, was a good subject on whom to practice.

“Drink?” Aoudad asked. “Smoke? Any kind of stimulant?”

“Thank you, no.”

“Are you able to touch such things—the way you are?”

Burris smiled grimly. “My metabolism is basically the same as yours, even now. The plumbing’s different. I eat your food. I drink your drinks. But not right this moment.”

“I wondered. You’ll pardon my curiosity.”

“Of course.”

“And the bodily functions—”

“They’ve improved excretion. I don’t know what they’ve done to reproduction. The organs are still there, but do they function? It’s not a test I’ve cared to make.”

The muscles of Aoudad’s left cheek pulled back as though in a spasm. The response was not lost on Burris. Why is he so interested in my sex life? Normal prurience? Something more?

“You’ll pardon my curiosity,” Aoudad said again.

“I already have.” Burris leaned back and felt his seat doing odd things to him. A massage, perhaps. No doubt he was tense and the poor chair was trying to fix things. But the chair was programmed for a bigger man. It seemed to be humming as if with an overloaded circuit. Was it troubled just by the size differential, Burris wondered? Or did the restructured contours of his anatomy cause it some distress?

He mentioned the chair to Aoudad, who cut it off. Smiling, Burris complimented himself on his state of mellowed relaxation. He had not said a bitter thing since Aoudad’s arrival. He was calm, tempest-free, hovering at dead center. Good. Good. He had spent too much time alone, letting his miseries corrode him. This fool Aoudad was an angel of mercy come to lift him out of himself. I am grateful, said Burris pleasantly to himself.

“This is it. Chalk’s office is here.”

The building was relatively low, no more than three or four storeys, but it was well set off from the towers that flanked it. Its sprawling horizontal bulk compensated for its lack of height. Wide-legged angles stretched off to right and left; Burris, making useful use of his added peripheral vision, peered as far as he could around the sides of the building and calculated that it was probably eight-sided. The outer wall was of a dull brown metal, neatly finished, pebbled in an ornamental way. No light was visible within; but, then, there were no windows.

One wall abruptly gaped at them as a hidden portcullis silently lifted. The car rocketed through and came to a halt in the bowels of the building. Its hatch sprang off. Burris became aware that a short bright-eyed man was peering into the car at him.

He experienced a moment of shock at finding himself so unexpectedly being viewed by a stranger. Then he recovered and reversed the flow of the sensation, staring back. The short man was worth staring at, too. Without the benefit of malevolent surgeons, he was nonetheless strikingly ugly. Virtually neckless; thick matted dark hair descending into his collar; large jug ears; a narrow-bridged nose; incredible long, thin lips that just now were puckered in a repellent pout of fascination. No beauty.

Aoudad said: “Minner Burris. Leontes d’Amore. Of the Chalk staff.”

“Chalk’s awake. He’s waiting,” said d’Amore. Even his voice was ugly.

Yet he faces the world every day, Burris reflected.

Hooded once more, he let himself be swept along a network of pneumatic tubes until he found himself gliding into an immense cavernous room studded with various levels of activity-points. Just now there was little activity; the desks were empty, the screens were silent. A gentle glow of thermoluminescent fungi lit the place. Turning slowly, Burris panned his gaze across the room and up a series of crystal rungs until he observed, seated thronewise near the ceiling on the far side, a vast individual.

Chalk. Obviously.