Robert Silverberg - Thorns

“You’re dealing in fantasy now.”

“I ask you to have faith in my resources. Are you willing to part with your present body if I can supply something closer to the human norm?”

It was a question that Burris had never expected anyone to ask him. He was startled by the extent of his own vacillation. He detested this body and was bowed beneath the weight of the thing that had been perpetrated on him. And yet, was he coming to love his alienness?

He said after a brief pause, “The sooner I could shed this thing, the better.”

“Good. Now, there’s the problem of your getting through the five years or so that this will take. I propose that we attempt to modify your facial appearance, at least, so that you’ll be able to get along in society until we can make the switch. Does that interest you?”

“It can’t be done. I’ve already explored the idea with the doctors who examined me after my return. I’m a mess of strange antibodies, and I’ll reject any graft”

“Do you think that’s so? Or were they merely telling you a convenient lie?”

“I think it’s so.”

“Let me send you to a hospital,” Chalk suggested. “We’ll run a few tests to confirm the earlier verdict. If it’s so, so. If not, we can make life a little easier for you. Yes?”

“Why are you doing this, Chalk? What’s the quid pro quo?”

The fat man pivoted and swung ponderously forward until his eyes were only inches from Burris’s face. Burris surveyed the oddly delicate lips, the fine nose, the immense cheeks and puffy eyelids. In a low voice Chalk murmured, “The price is a steep one. It’ll sicken you to the core. You’ll turn down the whole deal.”

“What is it?”

“I’m a purveyor of popular amusement. I can’t remotely get my investment back out of you, but I want to recover what I can.”

“The price?”

“Full rights to commercial exploitation of your story,” said Chalk. “Beginning with your seizure by the aliens, carrying through your return to Earth and your difficult adjustment to your altered condition, and continuing on through your forthcoming period of re-adaptation. The world already knows that three men came to a planet called Manipool, two were killed, and a third came back the victim of surgical experiments. That much was announced, and then you dropped from sight. I want to put you back in sight. I want to show you rediscovering your humanity, relating to other people again, groping upward out of hell, eventually triumphing over your catastrophic experience and coming out of it purged. It’ll mean a frequent intrusion on your privacy, and I’m prepared to hear you refuse. After all, one would expect—”

“It’s a new form of torture, is it?”

“Something of an ordeal, perhaps,” Chalk admitted. His wide forehead was stippled with sweat. He looked flushed and strained, as though approaching some sort of inner emotional climax.

“Purged,” Burris whispered. “You offer me purgatory.”

“Call it that.”

“I hide for weeks. Then I stand naked before the universe for five years. Eh?”

“Expenses paid.”

“Expenses paid,” said Burris. “Yes. Yes. I accept the torture. I’m your toy, Chalk. Only a human being would refuse the offer. But I accept. I accept!”

“He’s at the hospital,” Aoudad said. “They’ve begun to study him.” He plucked at the woman’s clothes. “Take them off, Elise.”

Elise Prolisse brushed the questing hand away. “Will Chalk really put him back in a human body?”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Then if Marco had returned alive, he might have been put back, too.”

Aoudad was noncommittal. “You’re dealing in too many ifs now. Marco’s dead. Open your robe, dear.”

“Wait. Can I visit Burris in the hospital?”

“I suppose. What do you want with him?”

“Just to talk. He was the last man to see my husband alive, remember? He can tell me how Marco died.”

“You would not want to know,” said Aoudad softly. “Marco died as they tried to make him into the kind of creature Burris now is. If you saw Burris, you would realize that Marco is better off dead.”

“All the same—”

“You would not want to know.”

“I asked to see him,” Elise said dreamily, “as soon as he returned. I wanted to talk to him about Marco. And the other, Malcondotto—he had a widow, too. But they would not let us near him. And afterward Burris disappeared. You could take me to him!”

“It’s for your own good that you keep away,” Aoudad told her. His hands crept up her body, lingering, seeking out the magnetic snaps and depolarizing them. The garment opened. The heavy breasts came into view, deathly white, tipped with circlets of deep red. He felt the inward stab of desire. She caught his hands as he reached for them.

“You will help me see Burris?” she asked.

“I—”

“You will help me see Burris.” Not a question this time.

“Yes. Yes.”

The hands blocking his path dropped away. Trembling, Aoudad peeled back the garments. She was a handsome woman, past her first youth, meaty, yet handsome. These Italians! White skin, dark hair. Sensualissima! Let her see Burris if she wished. Would Chalk object? Chalk had already indicated the kind of matchmaking he expected. Burris and the Kelvin girl. But perhaps Burris and the widow Prolisse first? Aoudad’s mind churned.

Elise looked up at him in adoration as his lean, tough body poised above her.

Her last garment surrendered. He stared at acres of whiteness, islands of black and red.

“Tomorrow you will arrange it,” she said.

“Yes. Tomorrow.”

He fell upon her nakedness. Around the fleshy part of her left thigh she wore a black velvet band. A mourning band for Marco Prolisse, done to death incomprehensibly by incomprehensible beings on an incomprehensible world. Pover’uomo! Her flesh blazed. She was incandescent. A tropical valley beckoned to him. Aoudad entered. Almost at once came a strangled cry of ecstasy.

The hospital lay at the very edge of the desert. It was a U-shaped building, long and low, whose limbs pointed toward the east. Early sunlight, rising, crept along them until it splashed against the long horizontal bar linking the parallel vertical wings. The construction was of gray sandstone tinged with red. Just to the west of the building—that is, behind its main section—was a narrow garden strip, and beyond the garden began the zone of dry brownish desert.

The desert was not without life of its own. Somber tufts of sagebrush were common. Beneath the parched surface were the tunnels of rodents. Kangaroo mice could be seen by the lucky at night, grasshoppers during the day. Cacti and euphorbias and other succulents studded the earth.

Some of the desert’s abundant life had invaded the hospital grounds themselves. The garden in the rear was a desert garden, thick with the thorned things of dryness. The courtyard between the two limbs of the U had been planted with cacti also. Here stood a saguaro six times the height of a man, with rugged central trunk and five skyward arms. There, framing it, were two specimens of the bizarre variant form, the cancer cactus, solid trunk, two small arms crying help, and a cluster of gnarled, twisted growths at the summit. Down the path, tree-high, the grotesque white cholla. Facing it, squat, sturdy, the thorn-girdled barrel of a water cactus. Spiny canes of an opuntia; flat grayish pads of the prickly pear; looping loveliness of a cereus. At other times of the year these formidable, bristling, stolid gargoyles bore tender blossoms, yellow and violet and pink, pale and delicate. But this was winter. The air was dry, the sky blue in a hard way and cloudless, though snow never fell here. This was a timeless place, the humidity close to zero. The winds could be chilling, free of weather, going through a fifty-degree shift of temperature from summer to winter but otherwise remaining unaltered.