Robert Silverberg - Thorns

“Don’t be. If I had my choice, I’d be the dead one and he’d be alive. Marco and Malcondotto both. Believe me. I’m not simply making words, Elise. I’d trade.”

He felt like a hypocrite. Better dead than mutilated, of course! But that was not the way she would understand his words. She’d see only the noble part, the unmarried survivor wishing he could lay down his life to spare the dead husbands and fathers. What could he tell her? He had sworn off whining.

“Tell me how it was,” she said, still holding his hand, tugging him down with her to sit on the edge of the bed. “How they caught you. How they treated you. What it was like. I have to know!”

“An ordinary landing,” Burris told her. “Standard landing and contact procedures. Not a bad world; dry; give it time and it’ll be like Mars. Another two million years. Right now it’s Arizona shading into Sonora, with a good solid slash of Sahara. We met them. They met us.”

His eye-shutters clicked shut. He felt the blasting heat of the wind of Manipool. He saw the cactus shapes, snaky grayish plants twisting spikily along the sand for hundreds of yards. The vehicles of the natives came for him again.

“They were polite to us. They had been visited before, knew the whole contact routine. No space-flight themselves, but only because they weren’t interested. They spoke a few languages. Malcondotto could talk with them. The gift of tongues; he spoke a Sirian dialect, and they followed. They were cordial, distant … alien. They took us away.”

A roof over his head with creatures growing in it. Not simple low-phylum things, either. No thermoluminescent fungi. These were backboned creatures sprouting from the arched roof.

Tubs of fermenting mash with other living things growing in them. Tiny pink bifurcated things with thrashing legs. Burris said, “Strange place. But not hostile. They poked us a bit, prodded us. We talked. We carried out observations. After a while it dawned on us that we were in confinement.”

Elise’s eyes were very glossy. They pursued his lips as the words tumbled from him.

“An advanced scientific culture, beyond doubt. Almost post-scientific. Certainly post-industrial. Malcondotto thought they were using fusion power, but we were never quite sure. After the third or fourth day we had no chance to check.”

She was not interested at all, he realized suddenly. She was barely listening. Then why had she come? Why had she asked? The story that was at the core of his being should be of concern to her, and yet there she stood, frowning, big-eyeing him, unlistening. He glowered at her. The door was locked. She cannot choose but hear. And thus spake on that ancient man, the bright-eyed Mariner.

“On the sixth day they came and took Marco away.”

A ripple of alertness. A fissure in that sleek surface of sensual blandness.

“We never saw him again alive. But we sensed that they were going to do something bad to him. Marco sensed it first. He always was a bit of a pre-cog.”

“Yes. Yes, he was. A little.”

“He left. Malcondotto and I speculated. Some days passed, and they came for Malcondotto, too. Marco hadn’t returned. Malcondotto talked with them before they took him. He learned that they had performed some sort of … experiment on Marco. A failure. They buried him without showing him to us. Then they went to work on Malcondotto.”

I’ve lost her again, he realized. She just doesn’t care. A flicker of interest when I told her how Prolisse died. And then … nulla.

She cannot choose but hear.

“Days. They came for me. They showed me Malcondotto, dead. He looked … somewhat as I look now. Different. Worse. I couldn’t understand what they were saying to me. A droning buzz, a chattering rasping sound. What sound would cacti make if they could talk? They put me back and let me stew awhile. I suppose they were reviewing their first two experiments, trying to see where they had gone wrong, which organs couldn’t be fiddled with. I spent a million years waiting for them to come again. They came. They put me on a table, Elise. The rest you can see.”

“I love you,” she said.

“?”

“I want you, Minner. I’m burning.”

“It was a lonely trip home. They put me in my ship. I could still operate it, after a fashion. They rehabilitated me. I got going toward this system. The voyage was a bad one.”

“But you made it to Earth.”

How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

He said, “I made it, yes. I would have seen you when I landed, Elise, but you have to understand I wasn’t a free agent. First they had me by the throat. Then they let go and I ran. You must forgive.”

“I forgive you. I love you.”

“Elise—”

She touched something at her throat. The polymerized chains of her garment gave up the ghost. Black shards of fabric lay at her ankles, and she stood bare before him.

So much flesh. Bursting with vitality. The heat of her was overpowering.

“Elise—”

“Come and touch me. With that strange body of yours. With those hands. I want to feel that curling thing you have on each hand. Stroking me.”

Her shoulders were wide. Her breasts were well anchored by those strong piers and taut cables. The hips of the Earth-mother, the thighs of a courtesan. She was terribly close to him, and he shivered in the blaze, and then she stood back to let him see her in full.

“This isn’t right, Elise.”

“But I love you! Don’t you feel the force of it?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“You’re all I have. Marco’s gone. You saw him last. You’re my link to him. And you’re so—”

You are Helen, he thought.

“—beautiful.”

“Beautiful? I am beautiful?”

Chalk had said it, Duncan the Corpulent. I daresay a lot of women would fling themselves at your feet … grotesqueness has its appeal.

“Please, Elise, cover yourself.”

Now there was fury in the soft, warm eyes. “You are not sick! You are strong enough!”

“Perhaps.”

“But you refuse me?” She pointed at his waist. “These monsters—they did not destroy you. You are still a … man.”

“Perhaps.”

“Then—”

“I’ve been through so much, Elise.”

“And I have not?”

“You’ve lost your husband. That’s as old as time. What’s happened to me is brand-new. I don’t want—”

“You are afraid?”

“No.”

“Then show me your body. Take away the robe. There is the bed!”

He hesitated. Surely she knew his guilty secret; he had coveted her for years. But one does not trifle with the wives of friends, and she was Marco’s. Now Marco was dead. Elise glared at him, half melting with desire, half frigid with anger. Helen. She is Helen.

She flung herself against him.

The fleshy mounds quivering in intimate contact, the firm belly pressing close, the hands clutching at his shoulders. She was a tall woman. He saw the flash of her teeth. Then she was kissing him, devouring his mouth despite its rigidity.

Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!

His hands were on the satiny smoothness of her back. His nails indented the flesh. The little tentacles crawled in constricted circles. She forced him backward, toward the bed, the mantis-wife seizing her mate. Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

They toppled down together. Her black hair was pasted to her cheeks by sweat. Her breasts heaved wildly; her eyes had the gloss of jade. She clawed at his robe.

There are women who seek hunchbacks, women who seek amputees, women who seek the palsied, the lame, the decaying. Elise sought him. The hot tide of sensuality swept over him. His robe parted, and then he was bare to her.