Robert Silverberg - Thorns

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Duncan Chalk is a monstrous media mogul with a vast appetite for other people’s pain. He feeds off it, and carefully nurtures it in order to feed it to the public. It is inevitable that Chalk should home in on Minner Burris, a space traveler whose body was taken apart by alien surgeons and then put back together again differently. Burris’ pain is constant. And so is that of Lona Kelvin, used by scientists to supply eggs for 100 children and then ruthlessly discarded. Only an emotional vampire like Chalk can see the huge audience eager to watch a relationship develop between these two damaged people. And only Chalk can make it happen.
Attention: the text lacks aithor’s italic.

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She could not take her eyes away. The sight of those artificial features fascinated her. He sauntered toward the building, moving slowly, confidently. A powerful man. A man who could suffer and bear it. I feel so sorry for him. I wish I could do something to help him.

She told herself she was being silly. He had a family. He’d get along.

TWELVE: HELL HATH NO FURY

Burris got the bad news on his fifth day at the hospital.

He was in the garden, as usual. Aoudad came to him.

“There can’t be any skin grafts. The doctors say no. You’re full of crazy antibodies.”

“I knew that already.” Calmly.

“Even your own skin rejects your skin.”

“I scarcely blame it,” Burris said.

They walked past the saguaro. “You could wear some kind of mask. It would be a little uncomfortable, but they do a good job these days. The mask practically breathes. Porous plastic, right over your head. You’d get used to it in a week.”

“I’ll think about it,” Burris promised. He knelt beside a small barrel cactus. Convex rows of spines took a great-circle route toward the pole. Flower buds seemed to be forming. The small glowing label in the earth said Echinocactus grusonii. Burris read it aloud.

“These cacti fascinate you so much,” said Aoudad. “Why? What do they have for you?”

“Beauty.”

“These? They’re all thorns!”

“I love cacti. I wish I could live forever in a garden of cacti.” A fingertip touched a spine. “Do you know, on Manipool they have almost nothing but thorny succulents? I wouldn’t call them cacti, of course, but the general effect is the same. It’s a dry world. Pluvial belts about the poles, then mounting dryness approaching the Equator. It rains about every billion years at the Equator and somewhat more frequently in the temperate zones.”

“Homesick?”

“Hardly. But I learned the beauty of thorns there.”

“Thorns? They stick you.”

“That’s part of their beauty.”

“You sound like Chalk now,” Aoudad muttered. “Pain is instructive, he says. Pain is gam. And thorns are beautiful. Give me a rose.”

“Rose bushes are thorny, too,” Burris remarked quietly.

Aoudad looked distressed. “Tulips, then. Tulips!”

Burris said, “The thorn is merely a highly evolved form of leaf. An adaptation to a harsh environment. Cacti can’t afford to transpire the way leafy plants do. So they adapt. I’m sorry you regard such an elegant adaptation as ugly.”

“I guess I’ve never thought about it much. Look, Burris, Chalk would like you to stay here another week or two. There are some more tests.”

“But if facial surgery is impossible—”

“They want to check you out generally. With an eye toward the eventual body transplant.”

“I see.” Burris nodded briefly. He turned to the sun, letting the feeble winter beams strike his altered face. “How good it is to stand in the sunlight again! I’m grateful to you, Bart, do you know that? You dragged me out of that room. That dark night of the soul. I feel everything thawing in me now, breaking loose, moving about. Am I mixing my metaphors? You see how less rigid I am already.”

“Are you flexible enough to entertain a visitor?”

“Who?” Instantly suspicious.

“Marco Prolisse’s widow.”

“Elise? I thought she was in Rome!”

“Rome’s an hour from here. She wants very badly to see you. She says you’ve been kept from her by the authorities. I won’t force you, but I think you ought to let her see you. You could put the bandages on again, maybe.”

“No. No bandages, ever again. When will she be here?”

“She’s already here. You just say the word and I’ll produce her.”

“Bring her down, then. I’ll see her in the garden. It’s so much like Manipool here.”

Aoudad was strangely silent. At length he said, “See her in your room.”

Burris shrugged. “As you say.” He caressed the spines.

Nurses, orderlies, doctors, technicians, wheelchaired patients, all stared at him as he entered the building. Even two work-robots scanned him oddly, trying to match him against their programmed knowledge of human bodily configurations. Burris did not mind. His self-consciousness was eroding swiftly, day by day. The bandages he had worn on his first day here now seemed an absurd device. It was like going naked in public, he thought: first it seemed unthinkable, then, in time, it became tolerable, and at length customary. One had to accustom one’s self.

Yet he was uneasy as he waited for Elise Prolisse.

He was at the window, watching the courtyard garden, when the knock came. Some last-minute impulse (tact or fear?) caused him to keep his back turned as she entered. The door closed timidly. He had not seen her in five years, but he remembered her as lush, somewhat overblown, a handsome woman. His enhanced hearing told him that she had come in alone, without Aoudad. Her breathing was ragged and hoarse. He heard her lock the door.

“Minner?” she said softly. “Minner, turn around and look at me. It’s all right. I can take it.”

This was different from showing himself to nameless-hospital personnel. To his surprise, Burris found the seemingly solid serenity of the past few days dissolving swiftly. Panic clutched him. He longed to hide. But out of dismay came cruelty, an icy willingness to inflict pain. He pivoted on his heel and swung around to hurl his image into Elise Prolisse’s large dark eyes.

Give her credit: she had resilience.

“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, Minner, it’s”—a smooth shift of gears—“not so awful. I heard it was much worse.”

“Do you think I’m handsome?”

“You don’t frighten me. I thought it might be frightening.” She came toward him. She was wearing a clinging black tunic that probably had been sprayed on. High breasts were back in vogue, and that was where Elise wore hers, sprouting almost from her collar-bones, and deeply separated. Pectoral surgery was the secret. The deep mounds of flesh were wholly concealed by the tunic, and yet what kind of concealment could a micron of spray provide? Her hips flared; her thighs were pillars. But she had lost some weight. In the recent months of stress, no doubt, sleeplessness had shaved an inch or two from those continental buttocks. She was quite close to him now. Some dizzying perfume assailed him, and with no conscious effort at all Burris desensitized himself to it.

His hand slipped between hers.

His eyes met hers. When she flinched, it was only for the briefest instant.

“Did Marco die bravely?” she asked.

“He died like a man. Like the man he was.”

“Did you see?”

“Not the last moments, no. I saw them take him away. While we waited our turns.”

“You thought you would die, too?”

“I was sure of it. I said the last words for Malcondotto. He said them for me. But I came back.”

“Minner, Minner, Minner, how terrible it must have been!” She still clasped his hand. She was stroking the fingers … stroking even that tiny prehensile worm of flesh next to his littlest finger. Burris felt the wrench of amazement as she touched the loathsome thing. Her eyes were wide, solemn, tearless. She has two children, or is it three? But still young. Still vital. He wished she would release his hand. Her nearness was disturbing. He sensed radiations of warmth from her thighs, low enough on the electromagnetic spectrum, yet detectable. He would have bit his lip to choke back tension if his lip still could fall between his teeth.

“When did you get the news about us?” he asked.

“When it came from the pickup station on Ganymede. They broke it to me very well. But I thought horrible things. I have to confess them to you. I wanted to know from God why it was that Marco had died and you had lived. I’m sorry, Minner.”

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