Robert Silverberg - Thorns

“Do you still want to die so badly, Lona?”

“I don’t know.” The thin hands made clutching motions in mid-air. “If I only had something to hang onto… But look, I’m not supposed to be talking about me. I just wanted you to know a little of why I was here. You’re the one who—”

“Not supposed to be talking about yourself? Who says?”

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—”

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 quick—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.