Robert Silverberg: Thorns

Chalk played with the computer node at his left hand and said, “Good morning, David. How do you feel today?”

“It snowed last night. I like the snow.”

“The snow will be gone soon. Machines are melting it.”

“I wish I could play in the snow.” Wistfully.

“You’d chill your bones,” said Chalk. “David, what day was February 15, 2002?”

“Friday.”

“April 20, 1968?”

“Saturday.”

“How do you know?”

“It has to be like that,” said Melangio simply.

“The thirteenth President of the United States?”

“Fillmore.”

“What does the President do?”

“He lives in the White House.”

“Yes, I know,” said Chalk mildly, “but what are his duties?”

“To live in the White House. Sometimes they let him out.”

“What day of the week was November 20, 1891?”

“Friday.” Instantly.

“In the year 1811, in which months did the fifth day fall on a Monday?”

“Only August.”

“When will February 29 next fall on a Saturday?”

Melangio giggled. “That’s too easy. We only get a February 29 once every four years, so—”

“All right. Explain Leap Year to me,” said Chalk.

Blankness.

“Don’t you know why it happens, David?”

D’Amore said, “He can give you any date over nine thousand years, sir, starting from the year 1. But he can’t explain anything. Try him on weather reports.”

Chalk’s thin lips quirked. “Tell me about August 14, 2031, David.”

The high, piping voice responded: “Cool temperatures in the morning, rising to a hundred and three along the eastern seaboard by two in the afternoon when the overload coils cut in. At seven P.M. the temperature was down to eighty-two, where it remained past midnight. Then it started to rain.”

“Where were you that day?” Chalk asked.

“At home with my brother and my sister and my mother and my father.”

“Were you happy that day?”

“?”

“Did anyone hurt you that day?” Chalk said.

Melangio nodded. “My brother kicked me here, in my shin. My sister pulled my hair. My mother made me eat chemifix for breakfast. Afterward I went out to play. A boy threw a rock at my dog. Then—”

The voice was free of emotion. Melangio repeated his boyhood agonies as blandly as though he were giving the date of the third Tuesday in September, 1794. Yet beneath the glassy surface of prolonged childishness lay real pain. Chalk sensed it. He let Melangio drone on, occasionally prompting him with a guiding question.

Chalk’s eyelids slipped together. It was easier to throw forth the receptors that way, to reach out and drain the substratum of sorrow that had its existence beneath David Melangio’s trick brain. Old tiny griefs flowed like arcing currents across the room: a dead goldfish, a shouting father, a naked girl turning with heaving rosy-tipped breasts to utter words that killed. Everything was there, everything was accessible: the raw, maimed soul of David Melangio, forty years old, a human island well walled off from the stormy sea about him.

At length the recitation subsided. Chalk had had enough nourishment for now; he wearied of pushing Melangio’s buttons. He tapered off by returning to the idiot-savant’s strange powers of recall.

“David, catch these numbers: 96748759.”

“Yes.”

“And these: 32807887.”

“Yes.”

“Also: 333141187698.”

Melangio waited. Chalk said, “Now, David.”

Numbers gushed in a smooth stream. “96748759-32807887333141187698.”

“David, how much is seven times twelve?”

A pause. “Sixty-four?”

“No. Take nine from sixteen.”

“Ten?”

“If you can memorize the whole calendar upside-down and backward, why can’t you do arithmetic?”

Melangio smiled pleasantly. He said nothing.

“David, do you ever wonder why you are as you are?”

“As what?” Melangio asked.

Chalk was satisfied. The only pleasures to be extracted from David Melangio were low-level ones. Chalk had had his mild jolt of pleasure for the morning, and the faceless public would find a flicker of amusement in Melangio’s freakish abilities to reel off dates, numbers, weather reports. But no one would draw real nourishment from David Melangio.

“Thank you, David,” Chalk said in easy dismissal.

D’Amore looked ruffled. His prodigy had failed to awe the big man, and d’Amore’s continued prosperity depended on making frequent impacts here. Those who did not generally did not long remain in Chalk’s service. The shelf in the wall retracted, taking d’Amore and Melangio away.

Chalk contemplated the gleaming rings imprisoned in ridges of fat on his short, thick fingers. He sat back then, closing his eyes. The image came to him of his body made up of concentric inner cores, like an onion, only with each discrete layer insulated from its neighbors by a sheet of quicksilver. The separate strata of Duncan Chalk slipping and sliding across one another, well lubricated, moving slowly as the quicksilver yielded to pressures and squirted down dark channels…

To Bart Aoudad he said, “We must investigate the starman a little further.”

Aoudad nodded. “I’ll monitor the tracers, sir.”

To Tom Nikolaides Chalk said, “And the girl. The dreary little girl. We’ll try an experiment. Synergy. Catalysis. Bring them together. Who knows? We might generate some pain. Some human feeling, Nick, we can learn lessons from pain. It teaches us that we’re alive.”

“This Melangio,” Aoudad pointed out. “He doesn’t seem to feel his pain. He registers it, he engraves it on his brain. But he doesn’t feel it.”

“Exactly,” said Chalk. “My entire point. He can’t feel anything, only record and replay. The pain’s there, enough of it. But he can’t reach it.”

“What if we liberated it for him?” suggested Aoudad. He smiled, not pleasantly.

“Too late. He’d burn up in an instant if he could ever really reach that pain now. No, leave him to his calendars, Bart. Let’s not destroy him. He’ll do his trick, and everyone will applaud, and then we’ll drop him back into his puddle. The starman, though—that’s something else again.”

“And the girl,” Nikolaides reminded him.

“Yes, The starman and the girl. It should be interesting. We should learn a great deal.”

Long afterward, when fresh blood would stain his hands and his heart would pound with the surge of renewed life, it might all begin to seem like no more than an ugly, nasty dream to him. But he’d have to cross Heimdall’s shining bridge to get there. Just now he still lived in pain, and he felt now as he had felt while it was happening. Many terrors enfolded Minner Burris.

He was not a man normally vulnerable to terror. But this had been too much: the great greasy shapes moving about his ship, the golden manacles, the case of surgical instruments open and ready.

“—,” the pockmarked monster to his left had said.

“--, the creature on the other side had replied in what sounded like unctuous terms.

Then they had begun the work of destroying Minner Burris.

Then was then and now was now, but Burris carried about a load of pain and strangeness that eternally reminded him, waking or sleeping, of the thing that had been done to him behind the cloak of darkness, beyond the unspinning chill of Pluto.

He had returned to Earth three weeks ago. He lived now in a single room of the Martlet Towers, supported by a government pension and propped somehow by his own inner resilience. To be transformed by monsters into a monster was no easy fate to accept, but Burris was doing his best.

If only there were not so much pain—